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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | SIGNALS | EXIT CODES | FILES | NOTES | SEE ALSO | AUTHOR | COLOPHON |
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AUDITD(8) System Administration Utilities AUDITD(8)
auditd - The Linux Audit daemon
auditd
[-f] [-l] [-n] [-s disable|enable|nochange] [-c <config_dir>]
auditd is the userspace component to the Linux Auditing System.
It's responsible for writing audit records to the disk. Viewing
the logs is done with the ausearch or aureport utilities.
Configuring the audit system or loading rules is done with the
auditctl utility. During startup, the rules in
/etc/audit/audit.rules are read by auditctl and loaded into the
kernel. Alternately, there is also an augenrules program that
reads rules located in /etc/audit/rules.d/ and compiles them into
an audit.rules file. The audit daemon itself has some
configuration options that the admin may wish to customize. They
are found in the auditd.conf file.
-f leave the audit daemon in the foreground for debugging.
Messages also go to stderr rather than the audit log.
-l allow the audit daemon to follow symlinks for config files.
-n no fork. This is useful for running off of inittab or
systemd.
-s=ENABLE_STATE
specify when starting if auditd should change the current
value for the kernel enabled flag. Valid values for
ENABLE_STATE are "disable", "enable" or "nochange". The
default is to enable (and disable when auditd terminates).
The value of the enabled flag may be changed during the
lifetime of auditd using 'auditctl -e'.
-c Specify alternate config file directory. Note that this
same directory will be passed to the dispatcher. (default:
/etc/audit/)
SIGHUP causes auditd to reconfigure. This means that auditd re-
reads the configuration file. If there are no syntax
errors, it will proceed to implement the requested changes.
If the reconfigure is successful, a DAEMON_CONFIG event is
recorded in the logs. If not successful, error handling is
controlled by space_left_action, admin_space_left_action,
disk_full_action, and disk_error_action parameters in
auditd.conf.
SIGTERM
caused auditd to discontinue processing audit events, write
a shutdown audit event, and exit.
SIGUSR1
causes auditd to immediately rotate the logs. It will
consult the max_log_file_action to see if it should keep
the logs or not.
SIGUSR2
causes auditd to attempt to resume logging and passing
events to plugins. This is usually needed after logging has
been suspended or the internal queue is overflowed. Either
of these conditions depends on the applicable configuration
settings.
SIGCONT
causes auditd to dump a report of internal state to
/run/audit/auditd.state.
1 Cannot adjust priority, daemonize, open audit netlink,
write the pid file, start up plugins, resolve the machine
name, set audit pid, or other initialization tasks.
2 Invalid or excessive command line arguments
4 The audit daemon doesn't have sufficient privilege
6 There is an error in the configuration file
/etc/audit/auditd.conf - configuration file for audit daemon
/etc/audit/audit.rules - audit rules to be loaded at startup
/etc/audit/rules.d/ - directory holding individual sets of rules
to be compiled into one file by augenrules.
/etc/audit/plugins.d/ - directory holding individual plugin
configuration files.
/etc/audit/audit-stop.rules - These rules are loaded when the
audit daemon stops.
/run/audit/auditd.state - report about internal state.
A boot param of audit=1 should be added to ensure that all
processes that run before the audit daemon starts is marked as
auditable by the kernel. Not doing that will make a few processes
impossible to properly audit.
The audit daemon can receive audit events from other audit daemons
via the audisp-remote plugin. The audit daemon may be linked with
tcp_wrappers to control which machines can connect. If this is the
case, you can add an entry to hosts.allow and deny.
auditd.conf(5), auditd-plugins(5), ausearch(8), aureport(8),
auditctl(8), augenrules(8), audit.rules(7).
Steve Grubb
This page is part of the audit (Linux Audit) project. Information
about the project can be found at
⟨http://people.redhat.com/sgrubb/audit/⟩. If you have a bug report
for this manual page, send it to [email protected]. This
page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/linux-audit/audit-userspace.git⟩ on
2025-08-11. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
that was found in the repository was 2025-08-09.) If you discover
any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page,
or you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a
mail to [email protected]
Red Hat Sept 2021 AUDITD(8)
Pages that refer to this page: audit_request_features(3), audit_request_status(3), audit_set_backlog_limit(3), audit_set_backlog_wait_time(3), audit_set_enabled(3), audit_set_failure(3), audit_set_pid(3), audit_set_rate_limit(3), get_auditfail_action(3), auditd.conf(5), auditd.cron(5), auditd-plugins(5), zos-remote.conf(5), audit.rules(7), audispd-zos-remote(8), auditctl(8), augenrules(8), aureport(8), ausearch(8), pam_loginuid(8), systemd-update-utmp.service(8)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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