Veritas NetBackup™ Security and Encryption Guide

Activity monitor actions

Canceling, suspending, resuming, restarting, or deleting any type of job creates an audit record.

Alerts and email notifications

If an alert cannot be generated or an email notification cannot be sent for NetBackup configuration settings. For example, SMTP server configuration and the list of excluded status codes for alerts.

Asset actions

Deleting an asset, such as a vCenter server, as part of the asset cleanup process with the Asset Database API is audited and logged.

Creating, modifying, or deleting an asset group as well any action on an asset group for which a user is not authorized is audited and logged.

Authorization failure

Authorization failure is audited when you use the NetBackup web UI, the NetBackup APIs, or Enhanced Auditing.

See About Enhanced Auditing.

Catalog information

Certificate management

Creating, revoking, renewing, and deploying of NetBackup certificates and specific NetBackup certificate failures.

Certificate Verification Failures (CVFs)

Any failed connection attempts that involve SSL handshake errors, revoked certificates, or host name validation failures.

For certificate verification failures (CVFs) that involve SSL handshakes and revoked certificates, the timestamp indicates when the audit record is posted to the master server. (Rather than when an individual certificate verification fails.) A CVF audit record represents a group of CVF events over a time period. The record details provide the start and the end times of the time period as well as the total number of CVFs that occurred in that period.

Disk pools and Volume pools actions

Adding, deleting, or updating disk or volume pools.

Hold operations

Creating, modifying, and deleting hold operations.

Host database

NetBackup host database-related operations.

Logon attempts

Any successful or any failed logon attempts for the NetBackup Administration Console, the NetBackup web UI or the NetBackup APIs.

Policies actions

Adding, deleting, or updating policy attributes, clients, schedules, and backup selections lists.

Restore and browse image user actions

All the restore and browse image content (bplist) operations that a user performs are audited with the user identity.

To set an interval to periodically add audit records of the browse image (bplist) operations from the cache into the NetBackup database, use the DATAACCESS_AUDIT_INTERVAL_HOURS configuration option. Setting this configuration option prevents the NetBackup database size from increasing exponentially because of the bplist audit records.

See the NetBackup Administrator's Guide Volume I.

To add all the bplist audit records from the cache into the NetBackup database, run the following command on the master server:

nbcertcmd -postAudit -dataAccess

Security configuration

Information that is related to changes that are made to the security configuration settings.

Starting a restore job

NetBackup does not audit when other types of jobs begin. For example, NetBackup does not audit when a backup job begins.

Starting and stopping the NetBackup Audit Manager (nbaudit).

Starting and stopping of the nbaudit manager is always audited, even if auditing is disabled.

Storage lifecycle policy actions

Attempts to create, modify, or delete a storage lifecycle policy (SLP) are audited and logged. However, activating and suspending an SLP using the command nbstlutil are not audited. These operations are audited only when they are initiated from a NetBackup graphical user interface or API.

Storage servers actions

Adding, deleting, or updating storage servers.

Storage units actions

Adding, deleting, or updating storage units.

Token management

Creating, deleting, and cleanup of tokens and specific token issuing failures.

User management

Adding and deleting Enhanced Auditing users in the Enhanced Auditing mode.

User action that fails to create an audit record

If auditing is enabled but a user action fails to create an audit record, the audit failure is captured in the nbaudit log. NetBackup status code 108 is returned (Action succeeded but auditing failed). The NetBackup Administration Console does not return an exit status code 108 when auditing fails.

Any failed actions.

NetBackup logs failed actions in NetBackup error logs. Failed actions do not display in audit reports because a failed attempt does not bring about a change in the NetBackup system state.

The effect of a configuration change

The results of a change to the NetBackup configuration are not audited. For example, the creation of a policy is audited, but the jobs that result from its creation are not.

The completion status of a manually initiated restore job

While the act of initiating a restore job is audited, the completion status of the job is not audited. Nor is the completion status of any other job type, whether initiated manually or not. The completion status is displayed in the Activity Monitor (Administration Console) and in the Jobs (web UI).

Internally initiated actions

NetBackup-initiated internal actions are not audited. For example, the scheduled deletion of expired images, scheduled backups, or periodic image database cleanup is not audited.

Rollback operations

Some operations are carried out as multiple steps. For example, creating an MSDP-based storage server consists of multiple steps. Every successful step is audited. Failure in any of the steps results in a rollback, or rather, the successful steps may need to be undone. The audit record does not contain details about rollback operations.

Host properties actions

Changes made using the bpsetconfig or the nbsetconfig commands, or the equivalent property in the Host Properties utility, are not audited. Changes that are made directly to the bp.conf file or to the registry are not audited.