Hi, I should have read the man more carefully, I missed the checkpoint option on –ts ☹ I agree it would be better to have one directory per host. With hosts added dynamically I need to find a way to automate the log rotation and the cyclic ausearch Anyway, I saved my day. Thanks a lot Philippe De : Burn Alting [mailto:burn.alting@iinet.net.au] Envoyé : vendredi 28 février 2020 14:03 À : MAUPERTUIS, PHILIPPE; linux-audit(a)redhat.com Objet : Re: corrupted checkpoint Phillippe, From man ausearch .. -ts, --start [start-date] [start-time] Search for events with time stamps equal to or after the given start time. The format of start time depends on your locale. You can check the format of your locale by running date '+%x'. If the date is omitted, today is assumed. If the time is omitted, midnight is assumed. Use 24 hour clock time rather than AM or PM to specify time. An example date using the en_US.utf8 locale is 09/03/2009. An example of time is 18:00:00. The date format accepted is influenced by the LC_TIME environmental variable. You may also use the word: now, recent, boot, today, yesterday, this-week, week-ago, this-month, this-year, or checkpoint. Boot means the time of day to the second when the system last booted. Today means starting at 1 second after midnight. Recent is 10 minutes ago. Yesterday is 1 second after midnight the previous day. This-week means starting 1 second after midnight on day 0 of the week determined by your locale (see localtime). Week-ago means starting 1 second after midnight exactly 7 days ago. This-month means 1 second after midnight on day 1 of the month. This-year means the 1 second after midnight on the first day of the first month. checkpoint means ausearch will use the timestamp found within a valid checkpoint file ignoring the recorded inode, device, serial, node and event type also found within a checkpoint file. Essen‐ tially, this is the recovery action should an invocation of ausearch with a checkpoint option fail with an exit status of 10, 11 or 12. It could be used in a shell script something like: ausearch --checkpoint /etc/audit/auditd_checkpoint.txt -i _au_status=$? if test ${_au_status} eq 10 -o ${_au_status} eq 11 -o ${_au_status} eq 12 then ausearch --checkpoint /etc/audit/auditd_checkpoint.txt --start checkpoint -i fi That said, rather than sending events from multiple hosts to a single combined file, I would strongly recommend one maintain multiple files, one per host. The most recent change to the ausearch checkpoint code addressed this. So given a directory structure like say, repository/ repository/year/ repository/year/month repository/year/month/day repository/year/month/day/hosta/auditd.log repository/year/month/day/hostb/auditd.log repository/year/month/day/hostc/auditd.log ... repository/year/month/day/hostN/auditd.log one could orchestrate a script that run's multiple ausearch commands along the lines of ausearch -if repository/year/month/day/hosta/auditd.log --checkpoint .../hosta.chkpt ... ausearch -if repository/year/month/day/hostb/auditd.log --checkpoint .../hostb.chkpt ... etc On Fri, 2020-02-28 at 10:46 +0000, MAUPERTUIS, PHILIPPE wrote: Hi I set a cron job script to perform ausearch every 5 minutes on a central log server. The logs from various hosts are received together in the same file The logs are rotated on a daily basis Everything ran fine for several days, then suddently I got : Corrupted checkpoint file. Inode match, but newer complete event (1582684501.003:48035) found before loaded checkpoint 1582684346.999:48034 The events are : checkpoint audit.log.3: node=xxxxxxxx type=USER_END msg=audit(1582684346.999:48034): pid=15666 uid=0 auid=0 newer event audit.log.2: node= xxxxxxxx type=USER_ACCT msg=audit(1582684501.003:48035): pid=16000 I guess the problem is due to the log rotation since the two messages are coming from the same host. I have a few questions When it happens how can I restart the process ? Is there a way to restart ausearch from the newer event ? How could I extract the events between the checkpoint and the newer event ? The checkpoint file contains : dev=0xFD03 inode=1048581 output=xxxxxxxx 1582770601.342:380885 0x456 What is this : 0x456 ? How can I find the value for a given event ? Philippe Worldline and equensWorldline are a registered trademarks and trading names owned by Worldline Group. 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