auditd fails to start when rules and conf file are symbolic links
by Smith, Steven G (Steven)
Hey everyone,
I'm seeing some strange behavior when attempting to start the auditd
daemon. When I make the /etc/audit.rules and /etc/auditd.conf files
symbolic links, the service fails saying that it cannot open
/etc/audit.rules because of too many levels of symbolic links:
[root@bling etc]# ll /etc/audit*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 Nov 7 08:22 /etc/auditd.conf ->
/diskroot/etc/auditd.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 Nov 7 08:22 /etc/audit.rules ->
/diskroot/etc/audit.rules
[root@bling etc]# service auditd start
Starting auditd:
Error opening /etc/audit.rules (Too many levels of symbolic links)
[root@acidsnowflake etc]#
Note that there is nothing special about this particular diskroot
directory (i.e. there are no other symbolic links involved). If I
remove the symbolic links, the service works fine. The problem is that
I need to have the links there for various reasons. Is this a bug in
auditd, or did I do something stupid?
One last note, if I vi the file via the symbolic link, it works fine,
which leads me to believe that this is more likely something wrong in
the startup sequence or auditd itself (although I couldn't see any
issues that stood out to me).
Thanks,
Steve