Wednesday, August 3, 2016

How To View Login History and Logout History on RHEL 7

Overview

The purpose of this guide is to help us identify, view or audit user who logged and logout on the server and performed reboot(s) / shutdown(s).
We can extract from the report as to when a specific user logged in and also extract user login or logout information based on exact date and time.

Applies To

·        Tested on CentOS 7 and RHEL 7

Log Files Insight

Filename
Purpose
/var/log/wtmp
Records historical data of utmp.
/var/log/btmp
Records only failed login attempts of the server
/var/run/utmp
Records currently logged in user(s).

List Entries – Login and Logout Info

To view all users login and logout information, this information is extracted from “/var/log/wtmp” run the command;

last


List Entries – Full Login and Logout Info

To view full login and logout times along with date(s), run the command below, this will list first 5 entries;

last -F -n 5


List Entries – Shutdown Info

To view shutdown entries and run level changes, run the command below; this will also list one line above “runlevel” search string, which will give us info about the logged in user;

last -x | grep -B 1 runlevel

Note: grep -B 1 <search string> – Will print one line above the matching string.


List Entries – User

To view particular user’s entries, run the command;

last root | head -n 5


List Entries – Suppress Hostname

To view particular user’s entries suppressing hostname field, run the command;

last -R root | head -n 5


List Entries – Who Logged at Specific Time

To view user entries who logged to the server at a specific date and time, run the command below; Date and time should be specified in format “YYYYMMDDHHMMSS” followed by username.

last -t 20160720090505


List Entries – User Logged at Specific Time

To view entries who logged to the server at a specific date and time, run the command below; Date and time should be specified in format “YYYYMMDDHHMMSS”.

last -t 20160720090505 root


List Entries – System Shutdown

To list the entries of when the server was shutdown with additional information (full), run the command; To extract only the time when the server was rebooted, run the alternate command.

last -x | grep shutdown | head -n 1

last -x | grep shutdown | head -n 1 '{ print $5, $6, $7, $8 }'


List Entries – System Reboots

To list the entries of when the server was rebooted, run the command;

last reboot


List Entries – System Reboots Full Info

To list the entries of when the server was rebooted with additional information (full), run the command; To extract only the time when the server was rebooted, run the alternate command.

last reboot -F | head -n 1

last reboot -F | head -n 1 | awk '{ print $5, $6, $7, $8, $9 }'

List Entries – Bad Logins Attempts

To list all the bad login attempts on the server, run the command;

last -b


List Entries – User Still Logged-In

To list the entries who are still logged on the server. Run the command;

last -f /var/run/utmp


Slideshare Information

A downloadable document has been uploaded to Slideshare.


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