Comment 0 for bug 157858

Binary package hint: aide-common

INSTALLED AIDE VERSION
0.13.1-7

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION

The aide.conf.autogenerated file is not properly generated. Not fully understanding how the debian based aide package works, I can only guess that the problem is either incorrect permissions on the executable files in /etc/aide/aide.conf.d, or the application which is responsible for concatenating the /etc/aide/aide.conf file with snippets in /etc/aide/aide.conf.d is malfunctioning.

The symptoms presented in the system are email notifications that are similar to the following:

<BEGIN EMAIL>
This is an automated report generated by the Advanced Intrusion Detection
Environment on mlab-1420 started at 2007-10-27 14:16:53.

******************************************************************************
* AIDE returned with exit code 17. Invalid configuration! *
******************************************************************************
Errors produced (3 lines):
37:syntax error:[
37:Error while reading configuration:[
Configuration error

End of AIDE error output.

funny, AIDE did not leave a log.

The check was done against /var/lib/aide/aide.db with the following characteristics:
  Mtime : 2007-10-27 11:06:08
  Ctime : 2007-10-27 11:06:08
  Inode : 246640

The AIDE run created a new database /var/lib/aide/aide.db.new with the following characteristics:

End of AIDE daily cron job at at 2007-10-27 14:16, run time 0 seconds
<END EMAIL>

To reproduce the problem, merely perform a fresh install of aide in Gutsy.

TEMPORARY SOLUTION

The update-aide.conf manpage states that the executable files in /etc/aide/aide.conf.d will be run and the stdout is used in the aide.conf.autogenerated file. The /etc/aide/aide.conf.d/* files as installed, are not marked as executable in their permissions. It may be that update-aide.conf is supposed to identify the snippets with shell code and run it. Regardless, the contents of all the /etc/aide/aide.conf.d files are being inserted verbatim into the aide.conf.autogenerated file (minus the shell identification line, i.e. #!/bin/sh).

The workaround, and perhaps the solution is to modify the permissions of all the files with shell script to be executable. I ran the following shell script in a terminal, and was then able to properly generate the *.autogenerated file:

<BEGIN SHELL SCRIPT>
#!/bin/sh
chmod 755 10_aide_hostname
chmod 755 30_aide_apache2
chmod 755 30_inn2_vars
chmod 755 31_aide_amanda-server
chmod 755 31_aide_apt
chmod 755 31_aide_ifupdown
chmod 755 31_aide_torrus
chmod 755 70_aide_dev
update-aide.conf
<END SHELL SCRIPT>

Those may not be the correct permissions to apply, but it did get me over the hurdle.

The other aide related bug I posted can either be marked a duplicate of this, or just closed.