Tlog is a terminal I/O recording and playback package suitable for implementing centralized user session recording. At the moment it is not ready for production and is to be considered development preview quality.

Whereas most other similar packages write the recorded data to a file in their own format, or upload it to a custom server, tlog sends it to a logging service. The standard syslog interface is supported already, with journald possibly to come. The recorded data is encoded in JSON in a way which keeps it human-readable and searchable as much as possible.

The primary purpose of logging in JSON format is to eventually deliver the recorded data to a storage service such as Elasticsearch, where it can be searched and queried, and from where it can be played back.

Tlog contains three tools: tlog-rec for recording terminal I/O of programs or shells in general, tlog-rec-session for recording I/O of whole terminal sessions, with protection from recorded users, and tlog-play for playing back the recordings. You can run tlog-rec for testing or recording specific commands or shell sessions for yourself, or you can integrate it into another solution. Tlog-rec-session is intended to be a user's login shell. It puts itself between the actual user's shell and the terminal upon user login, logging everything that passes through. Lastly, tlog-play can playback recordings from Elasticsearch or from a file, made with either tlog-rec or tlog-rec-session. There is no difference in log format between tlog-rec and tlog-rec-session.

Build dependencies are cURL and json-c, which development packages are json-c-devel and libcurl-devel on RPM-based distros, and libjson-c-dev and any of libcurl-*-dev on Debian-based distros.

If you'd like to build tlog from the Git source tree, you need to first generate the build system files:

autoreconf -i -f

After that, or if you're building a release source tarball, you need to follow the usual configure & make approach:

./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc && make

From the same source tarball you can build an SRPM package:

rpmbuild -ts <tarball>

Or an RPM package:

rpmbuild -tb <tarball>

You can use one of the release binary RPM packages and install them with your favorite tool. The RPM package does all the necessary setup for you.

Otherwise, if you built tlog from source, you can install it with the usual make install:

sudo make install

If you are recording other user sessions, and don't want them to be able to affect the recording process, make sure you use tlog-rec-session and its executable is SUID/SGID to separate and dedicated user and group. It doesn't require running as root and will be safer with a regular, dedicated user.

You will also need to create the session lock directory /var/run/tlog and make it writable (only) for the user(s) tlog-rec-session runs as. On systems where (/var)/run is a tmpfs you will also need to make sure the session lock directory is recreated on the next boot. In that case, on systems with systemd you'll need to create a tmpfiles.d configuration file, and on init.d systems - a startup script, creating the directory for you.

You can test if session recording and playback work in general with a freshly installed tlog, by recording a session into a file with tlog-rec and then playing it back with tlog-play.

To record into a file, execute tlog-rec on the command line as such:

tlog-rec --writer=file --file-path=tlog.log

Both during, and after the recording you can play the session back with tlog-play:

tlog-play --reader=file --file-path=tlog.log

Change the shell of the user to be recorded to tlog-rec-session:

sudo usermod -s /usr/bin/tlog-rec-session <user>

Login as the user on a text terminal. By default the recorded terminal data will be delivered to syslog with facility "authpriv" and priority "info". It will appear in journal, if you use journald, in /var/log/auth.log on Debian-based systems, or in /var/log/secure on Fedora and derived systems.

Customize tlog-rec-session configuration in /etc/tlog/tlog-rec-session.conf as necessary (see tlog-rec-session.conf(5) for details).

Fedora and RHEL (and some other distros) use an approach for configuring system locale, where the login shell is responsible for reading the locale configuration from a file (/etc/locale.conf) itself, instead of receiving it through the environment variables as most programs do. Since tlog-rec-session is not an actual shell and cannot read that file itself, it will fail determining the terminal character encoding and abort, when started as a login shell on such distros.

To work that around, you can implement the approach Debian and derived distros use. I.e. use PAM's pam_env.so module to read and set the locale environment variables before shell or tlog-rec-session starts. To accomplish that on Fedora or RHEL, put this into the /etc/pam.d/system-auth file, along with all other session lines:

session     required      pam_env.so readenv=1 envfile=/etc/locale.conf

Rsyslog can be set up to deliver tlog messages to Elasticsearch. First of all, increase the maximum message size to be 1k more than the tlog-rec-session payload. The default payload is 2kB, so the rsyslog maximum message size needs to be "3k" if the defaults are used:

$MaxMessageSize 3k

The line above needs to be above any network setup in rsyslog.conf (put it at the top to be safe).

Then the Elasticsearch output module needs to be loaded:

$ModLoad omelasticsearch

Before sending tlog messages to Elasticsearch they need to be reformatted and real time timestamp needs to be added, which can be done with this rsyslog template:

template(name="tlog" type="list") {
    constant(value="{")
    property(name="timegenerated"
             outname="timestamp"
             format="jsonf"
             dateFormat="rfc3339")
    constant(value=",")
    property(name="msg"
             regex.expression="{\\(.*\\)"
             regex.submatch="1")
    constant(value="\n")
}

Then, a rule routing messages originating from tlog to Elasticsearch needs to be added. If you installed v4 or later tlog RPM package, or set up tlog-rec-session as SUID/SGID to a dedicated user yourself, then the rule can use that user ID to filter genuine tlog messages securely.

If your rsyslog receives messages from journald, with the imjournal module, then the rule condition should be:

if $!_UID == "<TLOG_UID>" then {
    # ... actions ...
}

Note that the above would only work with rsyslog v8.17.0 and later, due to an issue preventing it from parsing variable names starting with underscore.

If your rsyslog receives messages via syslog(1) socket by itself, with the imuxsock module, you need to enable the module's Annotate and ParseTrusted options. E.g. like this:

module(load="imuxsock" SysSock.Annotate="on" SysSock.ParseTrusted="on")

And then the rule condition should be:

if $!uid == "<TLOG_UID>" then {
    # ... actions ...
}

The <TLOG_UID> above should be replaced with the UID your tlog-rec-session runs as.

Otherwise you'll need to filter by something else. For example the program name (ident argument to syslog(3)), which tlog specifies as tlog. In that case the condition could be:

if $programname == "tlog" then {
    # ... actions ...
}

However, note that any program is able to log with that program name and thus spoof tlog messages.

Once your rule condition is established, you can add the actual action sending the messages to Elasticsearch:

action(name="tlog-elasticsearch"
       type="omelasticsearch"
       server="localhost"
       searchIndex="tlog-rsyslog"
       searchType="tlog"
       bulkmode="on"
       template="tlog")

The action above would send messages formatted with the tlog template, described above, to an Elasticsearch server running on localhost and default port, and would put them into index tlog-rsyslog with type tlog, using the bulk interface.

Add the following action if you want to also send tlog messages to a dedicated file for debugging:

action(name="tlog-file"
       type="omfile"
       file="/var/log/tlog.log"
       fileCreateMode="0600"
       template="tlog")

Further, if you don't want tlog messages delivered anywhere else you can add the discard action (~) after both of those:

~

If you'd like to exclude tlog messages from any other logs remember to put its rule before any other rules in rsyslog.conf.

Here is a complete example of a rule matching messages arriving from tlog-rec-session running as user with UID 123, delivered from journald. It sends them to Elasticsearch running on localhost with default port, puts them into tlog-rsyslog index with type tlog, using bulk interface, stores them in /var/log/tlog.log file, and then stops processing, not letting them get anywhere else.

if $!_UID == "123" then {
	action(name="tlog-elasticsearch"
		   type="omelasticsearch"
		   server="localhost"
		   searchIndex="tlog-rsyslog"
		   searchType="tlog"
		   bulkmode="on"
		   template="tlog")
	action(name="tlog-file"
		   type="omfile"
		   file="/var/log/tlog.log"
		   fileCreateMode="0600"
		   template="tlog")
	~
}

Once you got tlog messages to Elasticsearch, you can play them back using the still rudimentary tlog-play command-line tool. You will need to tell it to use the Elasticsearch reader (es), supply it with the Elasticsearch base URL, and the query string, which would match the messages for your session.

The base URL should point to the _search endpoint for your type and index. E.g. a base URL for index tlog-rsyslog and type tlog on localhost would be:

http://localhost:9200/tlog-rsyslog/tlog/_search

The query string should follow the Elasticsearch query string syntax. E.g. to look for session #17 which happened in the last week on host server, you can use this query string:

host:server AND timestamp:>=now-7d AND session:17

Use --reader (or just -r), --es-baseurl and --es-query options to specify the reader, base URL, and the query string respectively. The full command for the above parameters could look like this:

tlog-play -r es \
          --es-baseurl=http://localhost:9200/tlog-rsyslog/tlog/_search \
          --es-query='host:server AND timestamp:>=now-7d AND session:17'

If you're playing back an ongoing session, adding the --follow or -f option will make tlog-play wait for more messages after it plays back all that were logged so far. Just like tail -f will wait for more lines to be added to a file it's outputting.

Interrupt tlog-play (e.g. press Ctrl-C) to stop the playback at any moment.

Instead of specifying the reader and the base URL on the command line every time, you can put them in /etc/tlog/tlog-play.conf configuration file.

Currently tlog-play is very limited. It expects to receive all messages belonging to a single session, uninterrupted, beginning from the first one. It doesn't provide a way to speed up, rewind, or pause playback. It polls Elasticsearch for new messages, instead of asking to be updated when they appear. Even though the messages contain recorded terminal window (re)sizes, it cannot resize its own terminal to fit the output better.

Further development will be addressing these and other issues either in tlog-play, and/or in the upcoming Web UI, which will be a separate project.