How to "audit" a linux/oracle system that is administered through a web front end from a windows platform

April 29, 2008 12:33 PM

How to "audit" a linux/oracle system that is administered through a web front end from a windows platform ..

My google foo has completely failed me and I need some help! So, we have acquired a 3rd party system that runs on a linux box and all data is held in Oracle. 8 or so of us will be configuring the system via the system's back end web interface. Up until now all system we have administered are done by amending linux/unix files and we have simply kept a pre and post copy of the file so we can see what has been changed, by who and why.

Is there a application on the market that would let us do the same thing if, basically, a table somewhere in an oracle database is being updated as a result of a change made through a web front end?

posted by cantthinkofone to computers & internet (6 comments total)

You can dump all the appropriate tables before/after changes, just as you save the files, as long as you can query the DB directly. If you can modify the DB, adding triggers is also a time-honored hack for this sort of thing.
posted by devilsbrigade at 4:34 PM on April 29, 2008

By the way, you should be using version control for your flatfiles, not a ton of copies. Your life will be vastly simpler.
posted by devilsbrigade at 4:43 PM on April 29, 2008

And last post, I promise, but feel free to mefi mail me with other questions
posted by devilsbrigade at 5:40 PM on April 29, 2008

Is there any reason you're not using the audit functions built into Oracle? Point your googlefu towards "Oracle Audit DML" which should bring results that help you audit any table structure changes.

The audit functions are massively flexible though, not just limited to DML, so anything you do wish to track, be it logins, inserts, deletions or modifications are entirely possible. You can even audit based of query conditions (e.g. I only want to see when someone looks for the max(wage) in the employee table) The web-frontend is likely only using one account, so you can narrow down the audit trail based on that.

Asktom is always the first place you should wander to if you have any Oracle questions, his books tend to be the most readable on Oracle too.
posted by Static Vagabond at 7:14 PM on April 29, 2008

No idea about Oracle itself but keeping config files under version control of some kind is like a breath of fresh air. Use something fast and distributed like git and have a cron job that fires once a day and sends out annoying emails if there are uncommitted changes.
posted by Skorgu at 8:27 AM on April 30, 2008

thanks for all the replies - I'll go and investigate the Oracle Audit DML could be what I'm after.
posted by cantthinkofone at 3:02 AM on May 3, 2008