Question about setting watches in auto-mounted directories in RHEL 5.2

[Steve Grubb]

Hi,

I was hoping one of the kernel people would have answered this or taken note 
on something that may need fixing...but they didn't.


On Friday 21 November 2008 11:59:46 Taylor_Tad at emc.com wrote:
> I'd like to set a file system watch so that any activity in an
> auto-mounted directory is audited.

You can't at this point in time. When the rule is loaded, it needs to resolve 
the path down to a device and inode. If the file system is not mounted, it 
cannot do this and the rule is rejected.


> It looks like just setting a watchon a parent directory isn't sufficient.  For
> example, if I have directory path  /dir1/dir2 and auto-mount something at
> /dir1/dir2/mount-dir, setting a file system watch on /dir1/dir2 doesn't
> detect activity in the auto-mounted subtree.

True.

> Looking at the auditctl man page, it looks like I'd have to issue a command
> like "/sbin/auditctl -q /dir1/dir2/mount-dir,/dir1/dir2" to tell the kernel
> to watch the newly mounted file system as well. 

Yes.


> Unfortunately, auto-mounts are, well, automatic, so there's no one to issue
> that command.

I haven't looked into hal scripting deeply, but there may be some chances 
there, but it might not be easy to figure out where to add the command.


> Am I missing a better way to accomplish this goal?  Is my understanding
> wrong?

Not that I know of. We talked about needing to do this 2 years ago when the 
file system audit code was being written, but they never addressed the problem. 
I'd really like to see this fixed somehow.

-Steve