Confused about audit=1 in grub.conf

[Steve Grubb]

On Thursday, October 28, 2010 08:21:42 pm Eric Paris wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-10-28 at 16:22 -0400, Steve Grubb wrote:
> > You needed to add audit=1 to the kernel line ^^^ so that its passed to
> > the kernel.
> 
> 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.

That is true when you have audit=1 being passed to the kernel correctly. 
However, if you do not do that. You sometimes run into problems with gdm 
because of parallel booting. Its possible (even required an entry in the FAQ 
because it was happening that often - see #8) to get auid of -1 when logging 
in via gdm.

So, if you have audit=1 and pam_loginuid is in the correct places and you 
still get auid=-1, that is because its a daemon or program running that is not 
associated with a user session.

-Steve