Re: [PATCH V1] audit: add warning that an old auditd may be starved out by a new auditd

On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 6:24 AM, Richard Guy Briggs <rgb(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote: > On 15/09/14, Paul Moore wrote: >> On Sunday, September 13, 2015 12:08:19 PM Richard Guy Briggs wrote: >> > On 15/09/11, Paul Moore wrote: >> > > Although I suppose if nothing else we could send a record indicating >> > > that another auditd attempted to replace it ... if we can send it >> > > great, drop the new request and be glad we audited it, if we can't >> > > send it, reset the auditd tracking. >> > >> > This is actually a good idea. >> >> This would go well with your last patch to try harder on netlink send >> failures. > > Re-looking at the AUDIT_STATUS_PID case, I'm noticing we only > audit_log_config_change() on success. At the moment, auditd userspace > doesn't know about this new AUDIT_PING netlink message type I'm adding > for testing the health of the existing audit, so it will just be dropped > by existing auditd. I think it makes sense to add > audit_log_config_change() on both the orphaning and starving cases > indicating the result=0 so that there is a record. Arguably the > orphaning case can never happen again since the starving fix will > prevent a newer auditd from running. Just so I'm clear, the "starving" case is when a new auditd tries to evict a perfectly good auditd?

Otherwise, I think adding a result/success field to the AUDIT_CONFIG_CHANGE record makes sense as long as it doesn't break Steve's parsing code (I don't think it will, although it may simply ignore it, which is okay).

paul moore