Re: peculiar disappearance of most audit rules

Peter Grandi
2014-04-21T20:49:27Z

[ ... ]

>> For example:

>> time->Thu Apr 17 07:58:44 2014
>> type=CONFIG_CHANGE msg=audit(1397717924.255:37148): op="remove rule" dir="/boot" key="pkg-s" list=4 res=1
>> time->Thu Apr 17 07:59:04 2014
>> type=CONFIG_CHANGE msg=audit(1397717944.762:37151): op="remove rule" dir="/opt" key="pkg-s" list=4 res=1
>> time->Thu Apr 17 10:01:02 2014

>> type=CONFIG_CHANGE msg=audit(1397725262.301:37157): op="remove rule" dir="/fs/sozan/loc64-u12" key="pkg-l" list=4 res=1
>> time->Thu Apr 17 10:01:02 2014
>> type=CONFIG_CHANGE msg=audit(1397725262.301:37156): op="remove rule" dir="/fs/sozan/loc32-el5" key="pkg-l" list=4 res=1

> [ ... ] device and inode information. This is, technically,
> what your watch is on. If the inode disappears, then the rule
> is ejected. Rules can survive across renames but not
> deletions.

> I don't know what is managing your system, but its probably
> deleting paths.

I am the sole user (as far as I know...) of both systems, and I
am pretty sure I was asleep at least at some of the reported
times, and I can't imagine any of the system scripts deleting
and recreating '/boot' and '/opt', for example. Also I checked
the 'm' times of '/' and '/fs/sozan' and they are a few weeks
old. None of the "disappeared" paths seems to have been modified
in any way.

BTW this has happened also on a far smaller scale on a Debian
7/Wheezy system. Again a system where I am the sysadm and only
user, and it seems roughly at the same time as a treewalk.

The vague impression I have in both cases is that there is some
reason why under high load 'audit' just loses or deletes watches.
Note that this was not under high _logging_ load, because the
watches for '/opt' and '/boot' are to log in case of writing or
attribute changes, and the treewalk is entirely (on one side)
read-only. Indeed I see not even a trace of logging about those
accesses.

Anyhow, I have now recorded the inos of the watched directories,
and I shall also run 'inotifywait -m /' to catch if possible any
changes in '/opt' and '/boot'.