UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

How's it going, everyone? A question was posed to me recently, and since I don't know the answer, I was wondering if anyone knew the answer/could point me to a website or book with the answer.

The head Network Admin asked me if we were able to keep track of which users log into which boxes via NIS. I have looked in /var/log for anything in the NIS master and clients, but no luck.
The Master is a RedHat 8.0 server, while the clients are a RedHat 7.3 box and a SuSE 8.0 Enterprise Server box.

Not really - you can do the last command to find out who was / is logged in, but that won't be on one central server. If you push your syslog entries out to a central server, you can add an entry into different profiles (/etc/profile and if you use a central user profile) allowing the logger command to note that someone logged in.

Example:
Add to /etc/profile:
/bin/logger "`/bin/logname` logged into `/bin/hostname`"

That would add an entry such as this to /var/adm/messages (if syslog.conf is set up for it)
Aug 8 10:39:50 toast operator: [ID 702911 user.notice] operator logged into toast

Entry in syslog.conf:
*.emerg;*.err;*.alert;*.crit;*.warning;*.notice;*.debug @syslog1.mycom.com

This would log telnet sessions (but not ssh or rsh). Adding the same logger command to each user's .profile (or a central profile - can be done if all users have nfs mounted home directories, don't need (or security disallows) users changing .profile) will log messages if using ssh or rlogin commands (not when copying files with scp or running a command along with a rsh).

(Seems like too much work to bother, but it would give you what you a decent logging method).