Snort & Nagios

I put it off for awhile, but I finally got around to getting Snort up and running.  It was actually pretty easy to get it working.  Since I’m using OpenBSD all I had to do was:

# pkg_add snort-2.6.0.2p1-mysql

And then it was installed.  I used Oinkmaster to download the rules I needed, and it all just worked.  Now I need to work on configuring some kind of user interface to make going through the logs easier.  At this point I’ve got 600K of logs to browse for a single day’s activity.  I know there are some nice GUI’s out there to make this easier, so when I get a chance, I’ll look into that and find something useful.

On another topic, I’ve also finally gotten around to getting Nagios setup.  I’m tweaking what I want monitored and what kind of alerts I want to get.  I’m going through all our mission-critical systems and figuring out what I want to monitor so I can catch any problems before they become problems.  Once I get the monitoring setup, I need to figure out how I want to be alerted.  I’m thinking I’ll use SMS.  With my current phone plan it will be cheaper than having my phone check email on a regular basis.  I wonder if Snort and Nagios can work together?  It doesn’t seem so far fetched that I could configure snort to send alerts for specific rules to Nagios.  It’s worth looking into.

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