Filtering out non-interactive users

[PJB]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 05:21:49PM -0500, Steve Grubb [sgrubb at redhat.com] wrote:
> > In older versions of the audit code, we used the following type of system
> > call auditing rule which seemed to work pretty well:
> > 
> > -a exit,always -S creat -S open -S openat -S truncate -S ftruncate -F
> > success=0 -F auid!=-1
> 
> This rule looks correct except that if you have a 64 bit system,  I would suggest a -F 
> arch=b32 between the '-a' and '-S' and then another copy of the rule for the 64 bit 
> arch.

We are running purely 32-bit systems so I left out the architecture
filter. However while trying to debug I did add it in and it seemed to
make no difference. 
  
> > Can someone point me to documentation/examples or help me out with the
> > proper syntax for setting up rules that will exclude the background
> > processes? We are using auditd 1.7.4 now and the 'auid' filter above no
> > longer does the job.
> 
> There's been a lot of bugs fixed since then. You might try building a newer auditctl 
> and trying it out to see if that makes a difference. Also note that the event capturing 
> is done by the kernel and the kernel version would matter more than the auditd 
> version.

Unfortunately I'm in one of those situations where changing software
versions will cause severe heartburn with management and customer types
due to concerns about baseline stability, so I have to stick with what we
have right now. The kernel is 2.6.33.1 with no extra patches, as far as I
know. 

> Are you getting other events like logins? Just making sure your disk isn't full or 
> something else. And when you do auditctl -s, it shows the audit system is enabled?

We are getting CWD, PATH, and SYSCALL audit events in the log, but only
from files/directories that have an explicit watch set on them. I haven't
seen any other type of audit event other than those three come through,
and again only on things that we set explicit watches on.

Thanks,
Patrick