Re: linux-audit: reconstruct path names from syscall events?

On Wednesday, October 10, 2012 03:45:08 PM Mark Moseley wrote: > On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Al Viro <viro(a)zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt; wrote: > > Again, relying on pathnames for forensics (or security in general) is > > a serious mistake (cue unprintable comments about apparmor and similar > > varieties of snake oil). And using audit as poor man's ktrace analog > > is... misguided, to put it very mildly. > > Caveat: I'm just a sysadmin, so this stuff is as darn near "magic" as > I get to see on a regular basis, so it's safe to expect some naivety > and/or misguidedness on my part :) > > I'm just using it as a log of files that have been written/changed on > moderately- to heavily-used systems. If there's another in-kernel > mechanism that'd be better suited for that sort of thing (at least > without adding a lot of overhead), I'd be definitely eager to know > about it. It's a web hosting environment, with customer files all > solely on NFS, so writes to the same directory can come from an > arbitrary number of servers. When they get swamped with write > requests, the amount of per-client stats exposed by our Netapp and > Oracle NFS servers is often only enough to point us at a client server > with an abusive user on it (but not much more, without turning on > debugging). Having logs of who's doing writes would be quite useful, > esp when writes aren't happening at that exact moment and wouldn't > show up in tools like iotop. The audit subsystem seemed like the best > fit for this kind of thing, but I'm more than open to whatever works. The audit system is the best fit. But I think Al is saying there are some limitations. i know that Eric pushed some patches a while back that makes a stronger effort at collecting some of this information. What kernel are you using?