RE: ausearch produces a Warning
Thank you for the education and the guidance Steve.
It is greatly appreciated,
Warron French, MBA, SCSA
-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Grubb [mailto:sgrubb@redhat.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 12, 2016 9:33 PM
To: Warron S French <warron.s.french(a)aero.org>
Cc: linux-audit(a)redhat.com
Subject: Re: ausearch produces a Warning
On Thu, 12 May 2016 19:14:35 +0000
Warron S French <warron.s.french(a)aero.org> wrote:
Hello all,
I have audit logging working exactly as I want it now
(thanks to you all), but when running ausearch on various systems (not
all, which tells me something isn't consistent) I get a warning:
Warning - freq is non-zero and incremental flushing not selected.
<snip>
The question I have is, even this says "Warning" does it
mean there is
something I really need to be intensely looking into to prevent issues
to come?
ausearch/report/auditd all share the same config file parser code. This warning is
actually not important for ausearch/report, but is meaningful for auditd. What this means
is that you have incremental flushing halfway setup. Meaning that the value is non-zero as
if you intended to flush periodically, but you don't actually have incremental
selected as the flushing technique. The fix is to either select incremental as the
flushing technique or set freq to 0 so that its consistent with the flush technique.
The reason that you would want to use incremental flushing is for performance. I'd
recommend 100 or 200 for the freq setting on a busy or aggregating server. I'd
recommend 50 for everyone else.
I do not fully understand the impact of what the flush parameter. I
am also trying to comply with a STIG as well; I think that's what has
caused this message to be presented.
It means you may not be getting the logging performance that you intended.
-Steve