Re: Snort Snarf

[James Hoagland <hoagland () SiliconDefense com>]

At 12:24 PM -0800 2/21/02, Scott Taylor wrote:
> I've got snort working like a champ. Yesterday
> snort-snarf was running like a champ as well. I
> had scheduled it to run every 5min using crond.
> It worked great all yesterday, I checked the
> page every so often an the time stamp was
> changing and the page updating. At a certain
> time however it stopped working. When I got in
> this morning several crond process's were
> running and trying to execute the perl script.
> But they were all hung. I killed them all and
> disabled crond. Now when I run the same command
> I was running yesterday it just hang's. Any
> ideas as what may have happend? I checked my
> logs and nothing related seemed to show up.

Hello Scott,

How do you know they were hung?

Could it be that they were taking more than 5 minutes to run (due to 
your alert file growing large)?  This would explain the multiple 
instances.  To make matters worse, if they are contending for the 
same CPU, each instance would start to run slower and so would take 
even longer to finish, allowing cron to fire off even more instances. 
Negative feedback loop there.  If you exhausted your physical RAM 
too, that makes things worse since they are using slower swap memory.

BTW, SnortSnarf's output is undefined if you have multiple instances 
of it running to produce alerts to the same directory.

I suggest increasing your cron interval time.

Best regards,

  Jim

P.s. Also check out the SnortSnarf-users list.
--
|*      Jim Hoagland, Associate Researcher, Silicon Defense      *|
|*            --- Silicon Defense: IDS Solutions ---             *|
|*  hoagland () SiliconDefense com, http://www.silicondefense.com/  *|
|*   Voice: (530) 756-7317                 Fax: (530) 756-7297   *|

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