Snort mailing list archives

Re: heavily switched network questions


From: "Josh Berry" <josh.berry () linknet-solutions com>
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 19:57:18 -0600 (CST)

You cannot effectively monitor the network without swapping the switches
for ones that support spanning or running snort on every machine.  The
only way to halfway do it is hammer the switch you have with a tool that
forces the switch to behave like a hub which makes the switch pointless.

The best solution is to replace the current switches with ones that have
port mirroring.

I've looked into this ad can't seem to find an answer I like. Perhaps
I'm asking the wrong question.

Suppose I have a network consisting of a gateway which goes into a
firewall.  The connection from the firewall goes into a switch which
leads to another level of switches. some of these machines are servers,
some are workstations. None of the switches have port mirroring (SPAN
ports).

I understand how to set us IDS at the gateway with a stealth interface.
My question becomes, how do I effectively monitor the network.  If I put
a tap before each switch, I will not be able to monitor traffic between
2 machines on the other side of the switch, correct?

do I have to run  a snort sensor on each server? On each workstation?
Ideally, I'd like to have one sensor for each segment without having to
basically throw away existing hardware and get SPAN switches.

Stewart
--
Stewart Larsen <stl19847 () yahoo com>



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