Hi *,

it’s been a while since I last blogged, mainly busy with work and university. Good news though, I have finished my first thesis on OSSEC and PCI Compliance, and will probably upload it here at some point.

I just came up with the idea about writing a blog post about common pitfalls that I and almost every other OSSEC user will run into at some points.

So, consider this blog post to be a list of tips to troubleshoot OSSEC and how to solve it.

At this point I should mention that some of those problems may seem trivial to you, but maybe other find it useful and saves them some time googling….

1. tail: cannot watch `/var/ossec/logs/ossec.log’: No space left on device

ok, this is an easy one. However, the error message is a bit irritating because it indicates that the filesystem is full, which it clearly is not. Instead your system (or better said: the kernel) has reached the inotify watch limit.

You can run a

[root@manager ~]# inotifywatch -v /var/ossec/logs/ossec.log
     		  Failed to watch /var/ossec/log/ossec.log; upper limit on inotify watches reached!
     		  Please increase the amount of inotify watches allowed per user via '/proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches'. 

I ran this command to verify it:

[root@manager ~]# cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches
           	  8192

and then ran this command to increase it permanently

[root@manager ~]# echo 524288 | sudo tee -a /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches
	          524288

To find out what’s using up your inotify watches, run this command:

[root@manager ~]# for foo in /proc/*/fd/*; do readlink -f $foo; done |grep inotify |cut -d/ -f3 |xargs -I '{}' -- ps --no-headers -o '%p %U %c' -p '{}' |uniq -c |sort -nr

            	  2     1 root     init
            	  1   399 root     udevd
            	  1 21291 root     ossec-syscheckd
            	  1  1581 root     udevd
	          1  1580 root     udevd
        	  1  1475 root     crond 

So you can see, the syscheckd process is using a lot of inotify watches for realtime-alerting (real time file integrity monitoring).

I will edit this blog post and continuously add new tips to troubleshoot OSSEC. Shoot me an email with your OSSEC troubleshooting tips, or problems you ran into … looking forward to reading them!