[Oisf-users] Discrepancies in Snort and Suricata alerts

Michał Purzyński michalpurzynski1 at gmail.com
Tue Oct 16 23:59:01 UTC 2018


The number of suricata threads should be indeed equal to what you have pfring configured to. Not sure if pfring requires configuration in two places, though.

Some parts of the Septun tuning, like pinning workers to cores, correct memory settings and making sure you’re not allocating memory during runtime would still apply.

Ethtool, etc - depending on what pfring says.

They basically bypassed most of the Linux network stack and it’s hard to say what it is they did there. 

The only advantage I can find of pfring is that it should work on your kernel version.

> On Oct 16, 2018, at 11:53 AM, fatema bannatwala <fatema.bannatwala at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Had a quick question regarding using pf_ring, I think I am doing something wrong: 
> So in the suricata.yaml it says: 
> 
> "#Number of receive threads (>1 will enable experimental flow pinned runmode)"
>   #threads: 1
> 
> And I am using 18 as the threads value here in pf_ring section. So should I change it to 1?
> 
> Also, I am running kernel Linux 3.10 and for h/w NIC based RSS hashing it requires at least  Linux 3.14, so I can't use it unless I upgrade the kernel.
> But I think if I can set the pf_ring the correct way it should work. 
> Do I have to undo the ethtool settings mentioned in Septune to use pf_ring over af_packet? I believe those settings were mentioned for using af_packet and shouldn't be needed/set for pf_ring?
> 
> Thanks,
> Fatema
> 
>> On Tue, Oct 16, 2018 at 1:30 PM fatema bannatwala <fatema.bannatwala at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I tried with pf_ring, but couldn't get the "SearchProtect" (sid:2022813) to trigger still.
>> Next I am going to try the hardware hashing and af_packet in qm mode and see if there's any difference, will keep posted..
>> 
>>> On Fri, Oct 12, 2018 at 2:45 PM Michał Purzyński <michalpurzynski1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> After talking a bit more with Fatema, we learned there might be a problem with the kernel version on that server.
>>> 
>>> Victor's patch shows 30% of packets sent to a wrong thread. Bro and Snort use pf_ring.
>>> 
>>> Suggestions would be to use hardware hashing and af_packet in QM mode. Note - the XDP part is not needed for this setup to work.
>>> 
>>> https://github.com/pevma/SEPTun-Mark-II/blob/master/SEPTun-Mark-II.rst#setup-symmetric-hashing-on-the-nic
>>> 
>>> just do the symmetric hashing part and then change Suricata's configuration to use cluster_qm
>>> 
>>>   cluster-type: cluster_qm # symmetric hashing  is a must!
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On Fri, Oct 5, 2018 at 2:20 PM Michał Purzyński <michalpurzynski1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> How about we make Suricata write us a pcap in afpacket workers mode? I’m pretty sure a rule can do that.
>>>> 
>>>> > On Oct 5, 2018, at 8:17 PM, fatema bannatwala <fatema.bannatwala at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> > 
>>>> > Changing $HOME_NET to any in sid 2022813 didn't help though, still not getting that alert fired.
>>>> > One difference I had in suricata.yaml when running in offline pcap reading mode was, I set runmode to "single", while when suricata runs in packet sniffing mode it's set to "workers".
>>>> > 
>>>> > I tried to set it to "runmode:single" while on interface sniffing mode but was hit by ~60% capture loss, which makes sense as single threaded suricata can't handle the traffic flowing through the interface. 
>>>> > 
>>>> > The fact that alerts are fired when in offline single threaded mode and same alerts are not fired when online packet sniffing multi-threaded mode, makes me think it has to do with multi-threading vs single threaded mode and how "workers" are capturing packets.
>>>> > 
>>>> > I will keep looking.
>>>> > 
>>>> > (The good thing is that Interrupt/IRQ pinning has helped to reduce capture loss to 0%)
>>>> > 
>>>> > Thanks,
>>>> > Fatema 
>>>> > 
>>>> > 
>>>> > _______________________________________________
>>>> > Suricata IDS Users mailing list: oisf-users at openinfosecfoundation.org
>>>> > Site: http://suricata-ids.org | Support: http://suricata-ids.org/support/
>>>> > List: https://lists.openinfosecfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/oisf-users
>>>> > 
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