User Accounting   «Prev  Next»

Lesson 7

Redhat Accounting Auditing Conclusion

This lesson discussed accounting and auditing techniques that will aid you in solving any difficulties you may encounter. You have learned ways to monitor who is doing what on your system, and this should help you whenever you encounter malicious users. Process accounting and auditing shows you what is going on in your system and aids in determining what has been executed. This can be very valuable to you when trying to troubleshoot system problems.
You may feel this is a cumbersome task, but someday you will be thankful that you have kept track of what everyone has done and where he or she has done it. Even though it may be a huge task to uncover who did what and where, at least you will be able to find your culprit.
Having completed this module, you are now able to:
  1. Describe system accounting
  2. Describe process accounting
  3. Describe process auditing
  4. Describe user auditing
  5. Use logfiles for accounting and auditing

Glossary terms

This module introduced you to the following terms.
  1. Process accounting: Maintains an account of every process ever executed.
  2. Process auditing: Examines the process accounting logs and retrieves useful information.
  3. System accounting: Refers to the creation and maintenance of logs, which keep track of processes executed, user activity, and network connections.
  4. User auditing : Examines the system logs to determine information about user access.
The next module introduces you to network file and print services with NFS.

Managing Identities with FreeIPA

The FreeIPA project www.freeipa.org aims at providing software to manage security information across an entire enterprise or other computing environment. The "IPA" part of FreeIPA stands for identity (identifying and authenticating users and machines), policy (settings for access control of applications and machines), and audit (methods for collecting and auditing security events, logs, and user activities).
The "identity" area of FreeIPA represents the first set of FreeIPA features to be implemented. If you want to centralize management of security information, you can try these features in Fedora 11. You can use this first release of FreeIPA to configure IPA servers for user identity management and centralized authentication. Then use FreeIPA clients to work with that information. The software features that FreeIPA works with in this initial release include:
  1. Linux Fedora
  2. Network Time Protocol (NTP) Daemon
  3. Domain Name System (DNS) Daemon
  4. Fedora Directory Server
  5. Kerberos Key Distribution

User Accounting - Quiz

Before moving on to the next module, click the Quiz link below to test your understanding of process and user accounting.
User Accounting - Quiz