RE: Quick questions about recieved packets

["Joshua Berry" <JBerry () PENSON COM>]

What kind of NIC's are you using on the Sensor?  I have had some issues
with certain cards (mostly Realteks) on Linux, the Intel NIC's seem to
work the best and you can enable device polling (NAPI) in the kernel for
some of these cards as well which will boost performance.

________________________________

From: snort-users-admin () lists sourceforge net
[mailto:snort-users-admin () lists sourceforge net] On Behalf Of Joseph
Nicholson
Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2005 8:25 AM
To: snort-users () lists sourceforge net
Subject: Re: [Snort-users] Quick questions about recieved packets


I was afraid of that.
 
I have snort plugged into a Cisco 3560G Switch on a mirrored port.  I am
mirroring 10 other ports on the switch currently.  This is my core
switch and brings about 5 different network segments together.  I am
using the Official Snort Rules and the Bleeding Snort Rules.  Snort is
setup to kick out the Alerts via Syslog.  The local Syslog function in
Linux is setup to send the Alerts to a Syslog appliance that parses all
of my logs for me. 
 
For testing I setup Snort to output Alerts via unified logging and that
didn't help any.  I currently have both Tx and Rx being mirrored to my
monitoring port.  I tried just Tx and just Rx and got the same result.
The monitor port is a Gigabit port and the monitoring ethernet port is
running at a Gigabit also.  On the linux appliance that port is running
in promiscuous mode and has no IP.  I have a management interface on the
box also that I use to send the syslog files across and that I log into
to manage the box. 
 
Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.  This is the first
production Sensor I have setup.  All my testing sensors apparently
didn't have enough traffic being pushed at them.

 
On 10/26/05, Richard Bejtlich <taosecurity () gmail com> wrote: 

        Joseph Nicholson wrote:
        
        >I see that snort dropped 179457 packets because it couldn't
process them. 
        > Snort received 186246 packets
        > Analyzed: 6789(3.645%)
        > Dropped: 179457(96.355%)
        > My gut instinct is telling me that it dropped 179457 packets
because it
        > felt there was no threat from them and that the 6789 it
analyzed looked 
        > suspicious.
        
        Hi Joseph,
        
        You have a serious problem with your Snort deployment.  The
packets
        Snort dropped were never inspected, period.
        
        Can you describe your configuration?  Are you sending Snort
alerts 
        directly to a database, without Barnyard?  Are you running any
odd
        rules?
        
        Sincerely,
        
        Richard
        http://www.taosecurity.com
        




-- 
Joseph Nicholson