Confused about audit=1 in grub.conf

[Eric Paris]

On Thu, 2010-10-28 at 16:22 -0400, Steve Grubb wrote:
> On Thursday, October 28, 2010 03:40:58 pm Robert Evans wrote:
> >  I did some research and am confused about starting the audit daemon at
> > boot time, so that you don't get auid's of 4294967295.
> > 
> >  In RHEL 5.5, my grub.conf looks like this:
> > 
> > audit=1
> >  # grub.conf generated by anaconda
> >  #
> >  # Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this
> > file # NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
> >  #          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
> >  #          root (hd0,0)
> >  #          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/sda4
> >  #          initrd /initrd-version.img
> >  #boot=/dev/sda
> >  default=0
> >  timeout=5
> >  splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
> >  hiddenmenu
> >  title Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (2.6.18-194.el5)
> >          root (hd0,0)
> >          kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.el5 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
> 
> You needed to add audit=1 to the kernel line ^^^ so that its passed to the 
> kernel.
> 
> 
> >         initrd /initrd-2.6.18-194.el5.img
> > 
> > 
> >  audit=1 is the first line, so why am I still getting the 4294967295
> > auid's?

Steve's right, but the answer to your question is "because that has
nothing to do with audit=1."  auid's = -1 just mean that the process was
not started by a logged in user.  They were likely started by init.

-Eric