ausearch produces a Warning

[Warron S French]

Thank you for the education and the guidance Steve.


It is greatly appreciated,

Warron French, MBA, SCSA

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Grubb [mailto:sgrubb at redhat.com] 
Sent: Thursday, May 12, 2016 9:33 PM
To: Warron S French <warron.s.french at aero.org>
Cc: linux-audit at redhat.com
Subject: Re: ausearch produces a Warning

On Thu, 12 May 2016 19:14:35 +0000
Warron S French <warron.s.french at aero.org> wrote:

> Hello all,
>                 I have audit logging working exactly as I want it now 
> (thanks to you all), but when running ausearch on various systems (not 
> all, which tells me something isn't consistent) I get a warning:
> 
> Warning - freq is non-zero and incremental flushing not selected.
 
<snip> 
 
> The question I have is, even this says "Warning" does it mean there is 
> something I really need to be intensely looking into to prevent issues 
> to come?

ausearch/report/auditd all share the same config file parser code. This warning is actually not important for ausearch/report, but is meaningful for auditd. What this means is that you have incremental flushing halfway setup. Meaning that the value is non-zero as if you intended to flush periodically, but you don't actually have incremental selected as the flushing technique. The fix is to either select incremental as the flushing technique or set freq to 0 so that its consistent with the flush technique.

The reason that you would want to use incremental flushing is for performance. I'd recommend 100 or 200 for the freq setting on a busy or aggregating server. I'd recommend 50 for everyone else.


> I do not fully understand the impact of what the flush parameter.  I 
> am also trying to comply with a STIG as well; I think that's what has 
> caused this message to be presented.

It means you may not be getting the logging performance that you intended.

-Steve