Hello,

How can I check, which command is fired or run by which user and at what time on linux server ? We can see history of commands using history command.

#history



Jeet N.

The history files (.bash_history for bash, .sh_history for ksh) are just command history files to make it easier to reuse the command. They aren't really designed for auditing which is what you want to do. You can do "strings" against such files for users (in their home directories) to get the commands but they won't have time stamps associated. Also since this history files roll over time they won't have all commands. It is a good place to look if you suspect a specific command was issued and want to find out who did it but it doesn't really prove it because you can't tell WHEN they did it. (Usually you don't have to prove it - people are generally shocked enough that you figured out it was them.)


To really do full auditing you need to plan for and turn on system accounting. This does quite a bit of logging so you'd need to plan for having a lot of space for that.
This page may help (I found it with a Google search):
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/...ccounting.html

I wonder what process accounting actually can provide when auditing from an accountability point of view? Does output from for instance lastcomm include relevant details like command arguments?

Don't know because I've never enabled this in all the years I've been doing UNIX/Linux. I know that some organizations do (or did) charge internal departments based on computer usage based on the accounting.

There is a rather interesting documentary (and book I think and maybe later a movie) called: The CIA, The KGB and Me. It was about a guy noticing discrepancies in such an audit that led him to discover that East German spies were using his system (and others) to hack into things like the Pentagon. I gather from what I saw in that you can get quite a bit of detail.

Reading the link I posted above might be a good start.