Monitoring a tty session

[Craig A. Sharp]

I have a third party contractor that will be working on my HP-UX systems to assist in an upgrade.
I need to be able to realtime monitor their tty sessions so that I can see what they are doing. Also I need to monitor all other activity that they are doing. The main one is the tty sessions.

Can anyone help me with an idea on how to do this efficiently?

Thanks,

Craig

[MarkSyder]

You could use sudo (taking care to disable su) so that every command he uses is logged.

Mark Syder (like the drink but spelt different)

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Craig,

One thing you can do is to put the file 'script' in the profile so that you can watch their activity. However, they will need to have write access to the output file which means it can be manipulated. However, if you are watching it then you will find it out if they do any such thing.

For ex., create a directory say /tmp/scripts.
Chmod 1777 /tmp/scripts

Add "script /tmp/scripts/script.$LOGNAME.$(date +%m%d%H%M)" to your /etc/profile.

When the vendor logs in, it will create a file under /etc/profile. You can simply do a 'tail -f /tmp/scripts/script.user.date' and watch what they do.

This is one way of monitoring what others do. It does have it's limitations.

-Sri

[A. Clay Stephenson]

It's not free but there is a product called DoubleVision that should do all you ask. You can actually "sit over his shoulder" (in ghostly form) and watch (and/or record) everything he does.

http://www.tridia.com/

[Chris Vail]

The perfect solution to your question is Citrix Metaframe for Unix. It has the command _ctxshadow_, which allows a priviledged user to see exactly what an unpriviledged user is doing. This is more than text, it is graphical in nature. This is a perfect help-desk tool.

You can get a 90 day demo free of charge. Don't email--it'll take weeks to get a reply. Call their customer service people who will try to sell you the Windows products: don't accept this. Keep going through their sales office until you find someone who has heard of this product. If you give them your Fedex number, they'll overnight it to you.

Its a cinch to install, and a PITA to license, but maintenance is a breeze. A 3 user license is less than $3k USD, but it does share licensing with other Citrix products on your network, so the cost per seat plumments.

Its also available for Solaris and AIX. It uses the freebie Citrix client (downloadable from their website) or you can go through all the bother of configuring the NFUSE server (included) and then any web browser suffices for a client.


Chris