audit process on trusted system filling up disk quickly

[vz7r1x]

Hey Gurus,
I have audit process running on trusted base with HPUX 11V1, it audits everything. audswap is running every day thru cron but I had to change it to run every 10 minutes to catch up with audit data being generated in past few days.

In past few days, audit process has been filling up disk before server can switch and zip the primary aud file, and it ends up locking the system. there are no errors in logs reported. /etc/rc.config.d/auditing shows everything being audited and PRI_SWITCH=50000

audswap file looks like this:
[[ -s $AUD_DIR/audfile1 ]]&&(audsys -c $AUD_DIR/audfile2 -s 500000; mv $AUD_DIR/audfile1 $AUD_TMP)||(audsys -c $AUD_DIR/audfile1 -s 500000; mv $AUD_DIR/audfile2 $AUD_TMP)

This process has worked well for past 2 years and no changes have been made. All of a sudden, it is choking up the system.

audit files are really big and it is hard to look at all that enormous data and there are no errors in audit.
What should my approach be to handle this monster?
What do I look for in audit file thru sam?
What process I need to focus on?

Thanks

[Bill Hassell]

> it audits everything.

That's the first problem. Auditing a busy system means that several million lines of audit records can be generated every day. Your audit file location must have dozens of gigabytes of space available. Auditing is not choking the system -- the processes you are running are creating the records.

>This process has worked well for past 2 years and no changes have been made. All of a sudden, it is choking up the system.

"No changes have been made?" Probably not true. The auditing system is telling you that there are a lot more events occurring than in the past 2 years. The good news is that you have the small logs to compare to the big logs. The bad news is that you have to compare them.

> audit files are really big and it is hard to look at all that enormous data and there are no errors in audit.

Yes, they can be extremely large. There won't errors in the audit logs because auditing is simply logging each event (open, close, program start, etc). Auditing everything would never be done meet some auditor's requirement. It is typically used to look in great detail for very short time. Then auditing is turned off or reconfigured to more a more reasonable list of events. And if the huge logs are locking your system, the audit log directory is wrong. Never put uncontrolled files in system volumes like /var -- this will definitely lockup your system as /var quite critical to system operation.

> What should my approach be to handle this monster?

Turn off logging until reasons can be developed to justify each event that wilol be logged.

> What do I look for in audit file thru sam?

What are you expecting to see? It is not a list of warning or error messages -- that is syslog.log.

> What process I need to focus on?

Again, what is the exoected use of these logs? If auditing was simply turned on in hopes useful information might be obtained, turn off the auditing system and start with a list of goals.

[vz7r1x]

Thanks Bill.