On Tue, Jan 19, 2021 at 3:18 AM Burn Alting <[email protected]> wrote:
> I tend to have a rigorous auditing posture (see the rules loaded in 
> https://github.com/linux-audit/audit-userspace/issues/148) which is not 
> normal for most. Perhaps, Paul, you have hit the nail on the head by stating 
> that this 'severe delay' is not that unreasonable given my rules posture and 
> we just need to 'deal with it' in user space.
> We still get the event data, I just need to adjust the user space tools to 
> deal with this occurrence.
> As for what the system is doing, in my home case it's a Centos 7 VM running a 
> tomcat service which only gets busy every 20 minutes and the other is a HPE 
> Z800 running Centos 8 with 4-5 VM's mostly dormant. I can put any code in 
> these hosts to assist in 'validating'/testing the delay. Advise and I will 
> run.

I took a (slightly) closer look at the queuing code just now and the
corner case I suspected doesn't look very promising here.  On failure
to send a record to userspace, the record is put back at the front of
the queue to preserve ordering so the kernel *should* still emit
records in order even when auditd is under pressure, dead, or in the
process of a restart.  Also, in this case the kernel kicks the auditd
connection, disconnecting auditd's netlink socket; I imagine that
would be a notable event on your systems.

However, looking at the timestamps in the audit events you posted, I
noticed something a little odd.  If I align the timestamps a bit
better let's see if it jumps out at you guys ...

type=XXX msg=audit(1609519900.159:44606): ...
type=XXX msg=audit(1609519900.161:44607): ...
type=XXX msg=audit(1609519900.163:44608): ...
type=XXX msg=audit(1609519896.829:44609): ...
type=XXX msg=audit(1609519900.170:44610): ...

Let me guess Burn, you're running NTP/PTP :)  I'm not sure how auditd
handles things like this, but it looks like there was a small negative
time correction between events which caused the odd scenario where
event N+1 actually occurred before event N according to the wall
clock.  In other words, your system is time traveling ;)

-- 
paul moore
www.paul-moore.com


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