Snoopy is designed to aid system administrators by providing a log of commands that were executed on the system. Snoopy should be completely transparent to users and to applications. It acts as a preloaded library that provides a wrapper around calls to execve() syscall. Logging is done via syslog.

Snoopy supports various features that can be enabled by supplying arguments to configure command. Consult `./configure --help' for more information.

You can download snoopy release tarballs from this location: http://source.a2o.si/download/snoopy/

Alternatively you can download it from GitHub, by selecting a release tag at the branch dropdown selector, and then clicking the ↓ZIP button, next to the repository URL, below project description. (I know this is awkward, but GitHub has discontinued the "Uploads" feature)

# Check configuration options:
./configure --help

# Then continue with normal build procedure:
./configure [OPTIONS]
make
make install

At this point, snoopy is installed but not yet enabled.

If you wish to monitor only certain applications you can do so through the LD_PRELOAD environmental variable - simply set it to the full path to snoopy.so shared library before starting the application.

Example:

export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/snoopy.so    # default path
lynx http://linux.com/
unset LD_PRELOAD

WARNING: Using this method on multilib systems (64-bit systems capable WARNING: of running 32-bit applications) can cause malfunction because WARNING: preload config file /etc/ld.so.preload makes no distinction WARNING: between 32- and 64-bit programs and shared libraries.

# Enable it using entry in /etc/ld.so.preload
make enable

An entry is created in /etc/ld.so.preload file which causes execv() and execve() system calls to be intercepted by snoopy and logged via syslog.

Content of /etc/ld.so.preload should include the following line:

/usr/local/$LIB/snoopy.so

This applies only when you have installed both 32bit and 64bit version of the library in the appropriate paths.

On systems that support LD_PRELOAD_32 and LD_PRELOAD_64 you can use those variables to force loading of snoopy. If you with to enable it system-wide, ensure that correct values are held by those variables at boot time. Consult section 4.a of this README on how to set environmental variables. Setting them at boot time is usually distro- dependent. Users are also required to compile 32-bit version of library. To do so on 64-bit systems it is usually enough to set appropriate CFLAGS:

CFLAGS=-m32 ./configure [OPTIONS]

Of course your system must be cross-compilation capable. Consult your OS documentation for details on this subject.

The exact location of your snoopy output depends on your syslog configuration. Usually it gets stored in one of the following files:

/var/log/auth*
/var/log/messages
/var/log/secure

To disable snoopy, simply edit /etc/ld.so.preload and remove the reference to snoopy.so. Also unset any environmental variable that references snoopy (LD_PRELOAD, LD_PRELOAD_32 and LD_PRELOAD_64). Then you may also delete snoopy shared library from your system. Default installation path of snoopy shared library is:

/usr/local/lib/snoopy.so

execv() calls are now explicitly logged. Although, according to the man page for execv(), it is supposed to call execve(). To this date the reason why execv() calls weren't being logged is unknown, but we are working to find out why.

Snoopy Logger was created by: marius@umich.edu mbm@linux.com

Currently it is maintained by: bostjan@a2o.si

Development is currently located at the following URI: http://github.com/a2o/snoopy/

(and possibly other distributions)

Due to bug described at the links below, please make sure you test your Snoopy installation before you deploy it to production. The bug manifests itself at shutdown, when system hangs instead of finishing the whole shutdown procedure.

So far this has only been reproduced on Fedora, and there is a reference to Hyper-Threading, but no one has come up with a valid solution, only workarounds.

Bug descriptions: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=745603 a2o#1

How to test

• Configure, build, install, enable
• Make sure it is working by tailing log files
• Reboot #1
• Reboot #2. If second reboot is successful, you are on the safe side

Distributions known to work OK:

• Ubuntu Server 12.04.01
• Slackware 12.2+