No more report of quantity of rules successfully loaded

[Richard Guy Briggs]

On 2023-05-24 10:42, Steve Grubb wrote:
> Hello Warron,
> 
> On Tuesday, May 23, 2023 7:12:07 PM EDT warron.french wrote:
> > Hi, I am running auditd-3.0.7-4 on an Alma Linux v8.8.
> > 
> > I know that for all of RHEL 6 and RHEL 7 variants that I worked with, to
> > include CentOS (not Stream) that after I rebooted a server or restarted the
> > auditd service (with -e 1 set) that I would 100% of the time get a report
> > in /var/log/messages about the quantity of rules that successfully loaded.
> 
> It has never done that unless someone else has a patch they did not send 
> upstream.
> 
> > I could compare that to my unified rules file
> > (/etc/audit/rules.d/Unified.rules - for a reference) and strip out the
> > typical for auditd Control rules (-D, -e 1, -f 1, -b, -r, for examples) and
> > then assess if I had the full set of files loaded or not.
> > 
> > With this implementation of auditd, on version 3.0.7-4, I am not getting
> > those results anymore.
> > Am I looking in the wrong place, because for me this is important
> > information?
> 
> It has never done that. auditctl -D gives the output of auditctl -s as a 
> convenience. But auditctl -s has never reported how many rules are loaded. I 
> don't think the kernel has a counter. It has a variable for if any rules are 
> loaded, but not the quantity.

Minor correction: there is a kernel variable (audit_n_rules) that counts
the number of syscall rules in place, but it isn't reported directly
outside the kernel.  This feeds the boolean (struct
audit_context)->dummy.

> > Yes, I know that I can also manually execute "auditctl -l  | wc -l" and get
> > that information  too, but I was wondering if this is planned or if I am
> > looking in the wrong place, or what to do.
> 
> It has never done that and is not planned.
> 
> -Steve

- RGB

--
Richard Guy Briggs <rgb at redhat.com>
Sr. S/W Engineer, Kernel Security, Base Operating Systems
Remote, Ottawa, Red Hat Canada
IRC: rgb, SunRaycer
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