Configuring Audit Settings on Red Hat

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Configuring Audit Settings on Red Hat

In this lab, we will take a look at setting up auditing services on a Red Hat host. We will configure low space email alerting, limit logging space used, and limit the number of audit buffers. The overall goal of this lab is to control the amount of space our audit logs are using and to use email alerting in order to prevent a partition from filling up. *This course is not approved or sponsored by Red Hat.*

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Lab Info

Level

Intermediate

Last updated

Sep 10, 2025

Duration

30m

Challenge

Configure the auditd service to start automatically at boot
1. Run the following command to ensure auditd starts automatically at boot:
```
systemctl enable auditd
```
Challenge

Setup low disk space email alerts
1. Edit the /etc/audit/auditd.conf file and set:
  
  space_left = 100
  
  space_left_action = email
Challenge

Restrict the disk space used by the audit logs
1. Edit the /etc/audit/auditd.conf file and set the max_log_file and the num_logs values so their multiplied value is equal to 300 MB.
- Example:
  
  max_log_file could be set to "30" and num_logs could be set to "10".
1. Save and exit the file.
Challenge

Limit the number of audit buffers used by the system
1. Edit the file /etc/audit/rules.d/audit.rules and change the line showing -b 8192 to -b 5120.
2. Lastly, restart the auditd service
```
service auditd restart
```

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