Using AUDITCON for Container Auditing

NDS Concepts and Planning gives an overview of the NDS^® Directory database. It explains that the Directory database is a hierarchical database, consisting of container objects (which contain other objects) and leaf objects (which do not contain other objects).

Container objects can contain any combination of leaf and container objects. You can use various utilities (including AUDITCON) to browse the Directory database for container objects.

NetWare^® provides NDS auditing at the container level; that is, you can enable or disable auditing or set other configuration parameters for an individual container.

Auditing a container records information about attempted accesses to objects (and their properties) located directly in that container. Container auditing doesn't provide audit coverage for objects contained in subcontainers of the audited container.

The server provides two mechanisms for controlling access to container audit trails

• By assigning NDS rights on the audit trail Audit File object and its object properties
• By assigning a password to the audit trail

Container auditing is used to audit actions occurring to NDS objects. If you have containers ENGR and FINANCE, where actions in ENGR are audited and actions in FINANCE are not audited, then

• A request by an object in ENGR (for example, a User object) to access an object in ENGR is auditable (depending on whether the particular event has been selected).
• A request by an object in ENGR (for example, a User object) to access an object in FINANCE is not auditable, because access to objects in FINANCE is not audited.
• A request by an object in FINANCE (for example, a User object) to access an object in ENGR is auditable (depending on whether the particular event has been selected).
• A request by an object in FINANCE (for example, a User object) to access an object in FINANCE is not auditable, because access to objects in FINANCE is not audited.

The following topics are described in this section.

• Accessing the Container Audit Trail
• Displaying Container Audit Status
• Enabling Container Auditing
• Configuring Auditing
• Generating Container Audit Reports
• Generating Reports from Offline Audit Files
• Container Audit File Maintenance
• Resolving Container Audit Problems