Auditd hangs hard

[Matthew Booth]

On Sat, 2007-06-09 at 07:59 -0400, Steve Grubb wrote:
> On Friday 08 June 2007 10:32:54 Matthew Booth wrote:
> > I have a test server on which, if left to its own devices, the audit
> > daemon will lock up hard.
> 
> Does boosting the priority so auditd runs more often help? I think it defalts 
> to 3, you can make it 10 for an experiment.

Thanks, Steve. This put me on the right track. It turns out that not
only is LSF very noisy, but it also runs itself with niceness -20.
Renicing it to -5 and running auditd at -10 fixes the problem. I've
asked the customer to raise an issue against LSF as this strikes me as a
bug.

It does strike me that audit could cope with overload much better,
though. If it's configured to drop messages rather than kill the system,
it could probably disable auditing entirely when the kernel buffer is
full, and only re-enable it when there's enough space.

Matt
-- 
Matthew Booth, RHCA, RHCSS
Red Hat, Global Professional Services

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