auditd replacement in installer environment
by Vladimir Slavik
Hello,
while trying to make sense of the remaining C bits in anaconda, I found
that we actually have a mock auditd, which does nothing and replaces the
real auditd on boot.iso, via lorax templates.
Now I'm trying to understand why. Is it because it writes too much to
journal? Is it because it takes 90 MB memory? Something else?
Steve, Brian - would you know?
PS: https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda/pull/4331 - moving it from the
python module directory where it was hiding.
Best,
Vladimir
--
Vladimír Slávik <vslavik(a)redhat.com>
Software Engineer, Platform Engineering
Red Hat Czech, s.r.o.
11 months, 4 weeks
Re: auditd replacement in installer environment
by Brian C. Lane
On Thu, Sep 15, 2022 at 10:20:04AM -0400, Steve Grubb wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Thursday, September 15, 2022 8:11:39 AM EDT Vladimir Slavik wrote:
> > while trying to make sense of the remaining C bits in anaconda, I found
> > that we actually have a mock auditd, which does nothing and replaces the
> > real auditd on boot.iso, via lorax templates.
> >
> > Now I'm trying to understand why. Is it because it writes too much to
> > journal? Is it because it takes 90 MB memory? Something else?
> >
> > Steve, Brian - would you know?
> >
> > PS: https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda/pull/4331 - moving it from the
> > python module directory where it was hiding.
>
> I would guess that they are trying to prevent hardwired audit events from
> going into the install logs. If you boot with audit=0, you wouldn't need a
> mock auditd because auditing is disabled...except that systemd-journald
> blindly enables auditing. Maybe they fixed it to respect the command line by
> now, I don't know.
>
> Another item, and maybe this is the reason, if there is no auditd, selinux
> sends AVC's to syslog. So, maybe it's to suppress AVC's?
>
> I'd suggest booting with audit=0. If you get any events in your logs, you can
> probably replace auditd with a python variant. Libaudit has python bindings.
> It is not well tested for handling audit events. But it is used by semanage
> and some other python programs.
I talked to pjones (update in the PR as well) and it was because space
was limited and something needed to listen to the socket to throw away
the messages. My guess is that this is still valid, I don't think it
would provide anything useful in the installer environment, and would
just clutter up the journal with irrelevant messages. Maybe.
Booting with audit=0 may work, but one thing to remember is some people
use PXE and wouldn't have the same cmdline as the iso, so it may be
better to just keep this so it 'Just Works(TM)'.
Brian
--
Brian C. Lane (PST8PDT) - weldr.io - lorax - parted - pykickstart
1 year
