RE: SNORT Testing

["Terry Vernon" <tvernon24 () comcast net>]

I've been doing some benchmarking lately on snort packet loss and have found
great success using netstrain to load the line. I'm not looking at attack
detection right now as much as I am squeezing every last drip of performance
out.

What I do is start up 2 or 3 sets of netstrain, watch the system with "top",
then I start snort without -D and let it run for a bit before I ctrl+c it. I
check the dropped packets percentage and modify things trying to get it
smaller and smaller. I keep an eye on top to make sure the system isn't
loading abnormally. I also watch the speeds in netstrain for slow or spiked
traffic. It's not an exact method but works for me and is a fun way to kill
time.

I imagine once I'm satisfied or I reach the limit I will more than likely
load the network as before and start sending exploits, various scanning,
etc... That's how I test snort without spending a dime.

-Terry

-----Original Message-----
From: Byron Sonne [mailto:blsonne () rogers com] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 8:56 PM
To: focus-ids () securityfocus com
Subject: Re: SNORT Testing

> The tools that come to mind for me are 'stick' and 'snot':
> http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2004-09/0096.html

Folks... I never said they were good tools!

As far as I'm concerned, the only test that matters is a real world one. 
Every network is different, sometimes radically, and I don't see much of 
a point trying to generalize these kinds of things with a test suite.

Artificial tests give you artificial results.

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