Re: heavily switched networks

[Stewart Larsen <slarsen42 () cfl rr com>]

Well, you tell me.  As a network admin in charge of security, should I
be worried about intra-network traffic? 

Would I be better off running a host-based IDS like tripwire on the
servers I care about and only sniffing the uplink?

This is all theoretical, BTW.  But I'm researching for future
opportunities.

Stewart

On Wed, 2003-12-24 at 10:21, Erek Adams wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Dec 2003, Stewart Larsen wrote:
>
> > right, but where would you tap.
> >
> > Let's assume that I have the gateway and firewall set up going into a 16
> > port switch. We'll call this switch switch:0. Each port on switch:0 goes
> > to another 16 port switch.  We'll call these switch:1 through switch:16.
> >
> > I now have a nicely divided network with 16 segments of 16 computers
> > each. That allows me to have 256 computers on my network.
> >
> > How do I effectively monitor traffic within each segment without a
> > switch that supports SPAN?  Do I need to sniff on 256 different wires?
> > or am I missing some fundamental insight here?
>
> Perhaps....
>
> Do you care about network <-> network traffic?  If not, then just sniff
> your uplink.  Sniff the pipe from the FW to switch:0 and you catch all the
> traffic coming into your network, no matter how many segments you have.
>
> Cheers!
>
> -----
> Erek Adams
>
>    "When things get weird, the weird turn pro."   H.S. Thompson
-- 
Stewart Larsen



-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials.
Become an expert in LINUX or just sharpen your skills.  Sign up for IBM's
Free Linux Tutorials.  Learn everything from the bash shell to sys admin.
Click now! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1278&alloc_id=3371&op=click
_______________________________________________
Snort-users mailing list
Snort-users () lists sourceforge net
Go to this URL to change user options or unsubscribe:
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/snort-users
Snort-users list archive:
http://www.geocrawler.com/redir-sf.php3?list=snort-users