Logging users activity with termlog

[Lowell Gilbert]

Lukasz Wasikowski <idaho at kochana.org> writes:

> FreeBSD 4.9-RC. termlog 1.0.2-STABLE. I want to log users activity on my
> box.
> 
> 1. I'd like to run termlog -u UID as soon as user with UID log in. How
> should I do it?

I don't think there are any great answers there.  The easy hack is to
mess with login scripts, but that would be visible to the user (if
they checked).  For a fair amount of extra effort, you could hack it
into login(1) itself.

> 2. I noticed that running "screen program" and then leaving it (quit, not
> detach) makes termlog to quit with:
> 
> termlog: fatal: unable to poll device.: Bad file descriptor
> 
> User is still logged in. The same quit reason is when user don't use
> screen and logout. What's wrong?
>
> 3. -t switch should put timestamps in the output file but it doesn't.
> Files created with -t and without it are identical.

Those are problems specific to "termlog"; since I never heard of it
until now, I don't know much, but on the first I would guess that it's
not opening the "real" terminal line.

> Maybe there is a better way to log users activity?

Did you look at the watch(8) utility in the base system?