How to find the creation date of a particular user or group

[Karthik S S]

Hi Gurus,

How to find the date on which a user/group is created/modified. Is there any programmatic way to find this assuming that Auditing is not enabled for "/etc" directory.

Pl. help.

Thanks,
Karthik S S

[Karthik S S]

I am atleast expecting a YES/NO reply.

Thanks,
Karthik S S

[Duncan Edmonstone · Accepted solution]

Karthik,

I think the answer is probably no, you can't do this. Anyone with root priviliges can edit the /etc/passwd and /etc/group file, and there's no easy way of telling what was changed.

You could keep a copies of the files somewhere else, and compare them regularly, but that might not give you the granularity you require.

Or if all users/groups are added through SAM, you could examine the contents of /var/sam/log/samlog (IIRC).

HTH

Duncan

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

Hi Karthik,

you could do a daily compare with the file of yesterday. Make a copy of /etc/passwd and /etc/group and compare them once a day, recording the differences.

greetings,

Michael

[Bill Hassell]

There is no guranteed method. The reason is that a user or group is defined simply by an entry in /etc/passwd or /etc/group. The home directory can be anywhere, even shared with other users. Unix doesn't really know much about users, it's a concept designed for humans to separate tasks and activities. If you alway use SAM, the sam logs can be useful but if they get trimmed, the info is lost. About all you can do is look for the oldest file in the home directory, something like:

ll -t /home/ | tail

Groups are named as an entry in /etc/group but there is no other record. In fact, groups are simply numbers associated with a file's inode. If an entry does not exist in /etc/group, files can still be assigned a group number and ll will show that number. So a group is more of a documentation feature. /etc/group also defines multiple group membership but there is no record kept of changes to /etc/group.

[Karthik S S]

Thank you Duncan, Michael and Bill ...

I wish if Version Control can be enabled by default for important configuration files in Unix .... :-((


Thanks again,

Karthik S S

[Bill Hassell]

Well, the good news is that HP-UX is extremely configurable, and you aren't forced into a single way of doing things. For instance, you can use the tools like useradd, userdel and usermod with a script wrapper to invoke rcs (ie, co and ci) - see man rcsintro. Similarly, vipw could be wrappered and a new command vigrp created so that changes can be tracked. One of the problems with audit and/or version controls is what should be in the list of 'important' files. This means that all sysadmins agree not to use SAM for changing user accounts.

[Rory R Hammond]

If it is really important and is a really recent change.
you can recover /etc/group /etc/passwd to a none root file system. the day the group change appears, recover sulog, wtmp, sylog. history files etc.. start with the oldest backup first, use some algorythm to work forward.

Rory