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The user used to audit a Linux host should be root or have sudo access. Some distributions do not allow sudo over an SSH session without a terminal. On these distributions, root can be used.

Using a user account that has no sudo access (and is not root) will result in an audit without all possible attributes retrieved.

Sudo / Root is required for:

dmidecode
    (system - uuid, serial, form_factor),
    (bios - version, smversion, serial),
    (processor - socket),
    (memory - all)

netstat
    (netstat - program name where not owned by user running script)

NOTE - Running as different users will generate a different list of environment variables.

ESX

On VMware ESX, Open-AudIT uses SSH as it's primary method of auditing. SNMP is also supported (and detailed below).

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