How do I log every command executed by a user?

Question

I want to monitor all user's activity in my server.

Even when the user executes a shell command from some editor like vim I want to see them in the log file.

I have checked the tool acct but it is not listing the complete commands. (Please correct me if I have missed some options which does already).

Which Linux tool I should be looking at to solve this problem?

Answer 1

Add this line to your pam config responsible for logins (its system-auth on redhat based distros)

session    required     pam_tty_audit.so enable=*

To find out what was done, you can use.

ausearch -ts <some_timestamp> -m tty -i

This produces an output like this:

 type=TTY msg=audit(11/30/2011 15:38:39.178:12763684) : tty pid=32377 uid=root
 auid=matthew major=136 minor=2 comm=bash data=<up>,<ret>

The only downside to this is is can be a little bit difficult to read, but it is much better than most proposed solutions since in theory it could be used to record an entire session, warts n all.

Edit: Oh and you can use aureport to generate a list that can be more helpful.

# aureport --tty
...
12. 11/30/2011 15:50:54 12764042 501 ? 4294967295 bash "d",<^D>
13. 11/30/2011 15:52:30 12764112 501 ? 4294967295 bash "aureport --ty",<ret>
14. 11/30/2011 15:52:31 12764114 501 ? 4294967295 bash <up>,<left>,<left>,"t",<ret>

Answer 2

The best solution to your problem would be Linux' built-in audit system. Use man 8 auditd or check this page for more information: http://linux.die.net/man/8/auditd.

Also, you can check this tutorial - while it is slightly out of the scope of your question, it shows how the audit system works.