Re: Purchasing New Equipment for Snort

["Merida, Dylan" <Dylan.Merida () EKU EDU>]

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Martin,

Thanks for this information. One our sys admins had discussed with me that a change to innodb could improve 
performance. I know that the default snort schema uses myisam, so I wasn't sure if innodb could be used. Does anything 
special need to be done in addition to changing the table type and making sure the key buffer size is large enough?

On the MySQL 5.5 issue, should we see a performance increase just by upgrading the server version? I'm sure you know 
that BASE uses the adodb libraries and they aren't updated often. I'm not sure about Barnyard, can it use MySQL 5.5 
client libraries if compiled with 5.5 installed?

Thanks for your time,

Dylan Merida
Security Analyst
Information Technology
Eastern Kentucky University

NOTE: IT @ EKU will NEVER request passwords or other personal information via email. Messages requesting such 
information are fraudulent and should be deleted.

On Apr 18, 2011, at 10:58 PM, Martin Holste wrote:

> Since Snort won't be utilizing the disk much, you should get one beefy
> box (>=16 cores) and a ton of ram and disk and run it all on one box.
> You could get two, but this saves a lot of sys admin overhead.
>
> Make sure your tables are using innodb and allocate at least as much
> key buffer memory as it will take to fit the keys for your tables in
> memory.  You can find that with the index_length column in the
> information_schema.tables system table.  Also, be sure to use Mysql
> 5.5 as it has many performance improvements.
>
> Postgres trolls/snobs will also point out that pgsql has better
> concurrency rates, and so may be better suited for this scenario.
>
> On Monday, April 18, 2011, Merida, Dylan <Dylan.Merida () eku edu> wrote:
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> > Hey All,
> >
> > It's come time for EKU to do some equipment upgrades. I have the opportunity to throw some beefy hardware at snort 
> > and its database server. Our current set up is running on one single core 3.2 GHz Xeon with 12 GBs of RAM. The MySQL 
> > database is hosted on a separate box that's a multicore Xeon; it also serves one other purpose, so the load is quite 
> > high (and slow) when performing extensive database queries. I'm currently running one sensor at egress/ingress to 
> > the internet. I would like to deploy 4 more sensors throughout our network and run this on one multicore box. We 
> > currently average about 1.5 million alerts a day on a gigabit pipe that averages around 300 Mbps. Queries are quite 
> > slow when examining a large dataset (like 24 hrs), so I also want queries to be extremely fast in BASE and Snorby.
> >
> > My question is this: If I could buy two servers with any specs that I wanted, what would allow me to run 5 sensors 
> > on one box and a beefy MySQL database on another that can run most queries in under 10 seconds?
> >
> > So far, we've tried some tests with a large storage box with SSD cache running FreeBSD and ZFS. There appear to be 
> > some limitations in the FreeBSD MySQL daemon. I'd also like to know what OSes you might suggest. (We're fans of Red 
> > Hat, but are open to anything.) Also, would you run Barnyard on the sensor box or push the alerts to the DB server 
> > and then parse them from there?
> >
> > Let me know what you think.
> >
> > Thank you,
> >
> > Dylan Merida
> > Security Analyst
> > Information Technology
> > Eastern Kentucky University
> >
> > NOTE: IT @ EKU will NEVER request passwords or other personal information via email. Messages requesting such 
> > information are fraudulent and should be deleted.
> >
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Benefiting from Server Virtualization: Beyond Initial Workload 
Consolidation -- Increasing the use of server virtualization is a top
priority.Virtualization can reduce costs, simplify management, and improve 
application availability and disaster protection. Learn more about boosting 
the value of server virtualization. http://p.sf.net/sfu/vmware-sfdev2dev
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