Brilliant, a firewall reboot dealt with it.  Navigating away did not remove the dirty file.  Might be useful if there were some sort of 'purge' facility available for handling unwanted pending changes. Regards, Rob.

If you pasted in your Oinkcode and are not getting errors, then you are getting the subscriber rules.  The Snort web site picks the rules based on the Oinkcode supplied as part of the rules download URL.  The Snort package on pfSense generates that URL for you behind the scenes using the Oinkcode you provide on the GLOBAL SETTINGS tab. Other than trusting that, you could manually verify by looking at the Snort VRT rule update release notes and verifying that any newly posted or modified rules show up that way on your box.  You can examine the text of individual rules on the RULES tab for an interface (only the rules from the categories you have selected will display, though). Bill

I've posted a comment on another thread, but I thought it would be useful to post it here. As stated above I am using a Gigabyte motherboard which uses Realtek gigabit chips, which were giving me problems on the WAN. I added an expansion card with Intel chips to try to resolve the problem (which it did) and it also had the side effect of eliminating my problems with Snort! The network issue was that my WAN interface uses PPPoE and this would fail after 3-4 days and I would need to reboot pfSense.

yup very common stuff..  You have to keep in mind when you turn on something like snort..  There is going to be lots and lots of noise ;)  you really have to tweak the rule sets to look for the stuff that is actual concern..  And then once you do that you might not see anything… Other than as a learning tool, I don't see much use for a ids in a home setup..  Unless you do manage to let one of your machines get infected pretty much all your going to see is noise..

You're welcome.  The thanks is really due to the guys in that linked thread who found the cause and fix.  If I recall correctly, Suricata upstream fixed a bug in that part of the code.  The fix then made installs that formerly worked (incorrectly it turns out, but they would start anyway) stop working and throw the memory allocation error. Bill

@Snailkhan: i am also receiving these alerts but the source address is the wan address of my pfsense assigned via ppoe one of the destination ip belongs to akamai technologies.. and others cannot resolve. If you run Snort or Suricata on the WAN interface only, then you can not see your internal LAN IP addresses in alerts because the Snort daemon sees everything after the outbound NAT rules are applied (and before incoming traffic is "un-NAT'd").  For this reason, many home users prefer to run Snort or Suricata on the LAN interface.  Here, the IP addresses are seen pre-NAT when outbound and post-NAT when inbound.  This makes it easy to identify internal hosts. Bill

Thank you for taking time to clarify this for me.

Correct, this was a Windows 10 machine. The "offending" process was svchost.exe and the IP resolved to Akamai Technologies.

A reinstall removes it and puts it back.  For some reason, in your case, the "puts it back" appears to be failing.  It is removed because when Snort is removed, the widget is useless and can even cause errors because the underlying supporting package is gone. Bill

Thank you so much David for your response. I will give it a try…. thanks again for your help.

@bmeeks: You really do not have enough RAM in that firewall to reliably run Snort.  You are getting this random behavior most likely because you are running out of memory and RAM Drive disk space.  On a Nano-based system, some of your 1 GB of RAM is used to provide the /tmp and /var disk partitions.  That further limits the free RAM available to Snort.  Also, with only 1 GB of RAM to start with, those two RAM Disk partitions are going to be a bit tight when it comes to holding the rules tarball files during updates and even when downloading and extracting the PBI package files on installs.  When you exhaust the /tmp or /var partitions during package installation, weird and random stuff can happen.  I suspect its working when you wipe the settings out because then it is not exhausting RAM during reinstallation when trying to restore the saved settings and download all the previously selected rules at once. The same Snort package has run uninterrupted for months on my firewall with three active interfaces and quite a few rules.  I have never had an issue with a Snort upgrade.  My firewall has a 40 GB conventional hard disk and 16 GB of RAM.  Prior to this one, I had a box with 4 GB of RAM and never had any issues there either.  You need lots of RAM and plenty of disk space for logging to reliably run Snort and Suricata.  NanoBSD is just not a good platform for running these two packages.  I'm not saying it can't work if you through enough RAM at it, but most NanoBSD installs don't have a lot of RAM. Bill snort was running fine for another 35+ hours .. besides i also added freeradius (it would hardly authenticate 3-5  users in the entire day ). and was working fine.. however i got 2gb ddr2 ram for my box (thats its max support. as its single port) and still all is ok .. though i havent enabled the emerging threats .. though i increased space of /var /tmp to 150 MB .. as i fear it will again break things and i would have to remove snort redo all configs. 32gb ssd is being shipped from china via slow boat. waiting for it to do a full blown installation

Reinstall worked.  One of the interfaces did not come back up immediately, but I was able to restart it. <update>  On my second site, the upgrade worked perfectly.  <end update="">Thank you.</end></update>

@Snailkhan: so doing so will put snort form IDS to IPS Mode ? BBCan177 answered your question very well in the second post of this thread. https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=94003.msg521687#msg521687

@fantasypoo: hmm.. does the same apply to Suricata ?  Default is AC Suricata is a completely different binary code base.  You can't really compare the two in this area. Bill

I have no idea why but reinstalling xml and package worked okay for me.

Yes that feature is already present in Snort/Suricata… see 'Snort Interfaces' Tab, "+" icon at Right. Ah, Thanks.

The Snort package is designed with some defaults to make things easier for most situations.  One of those defaults is the automatic inclusion of all firewall interface networks (other than the WAN) into HOME_NET and the default PASS LIST.  Your situation is different and the defaults sound like they are not what you want. You can fix this by creating custom Pass Lists on the PASS LIST tab.  When creating them, uncheck all the "default checked" options and then only check the ones you want (or none of them).  Use an Alias to contain all the addresses you want in the list. For example, assume you want to create a custom HOME_NET on the DMZ interface.  First, create an Alias under Firewall > Aliases to hold all the addresses you want in the custom HOME_NET.  Remember an alias can contain other aliases (nested aliases), so you should be able to construct a single alias containing all the IP addresses you want.  Next, create a custom pass list and call it maybe MY_HOME_NET or whatever.  In the Pass List dialog uncheck all the default-checked options (unless there are some you want).  Now select the alias you created earlier in the ADDRESS box at the bottom of the screen.  Just start typing the name and it should auto-populate with matching values.  Save the custom Pass List. Now go to the Snort interface (DMZ) where you want to use the custom HOME_NET.  Select the INTERFACE SETTINGS tab.  Scroll down to the HOME_NET drop-down selector.  Select the custom HOME_NET Pass List you created above.  Save the change and then restart Snort on the interface.  It will now be using that HOME_NET.  You can repeat the process for custom Pass List and even a custom EXTERNAL_NET if you want. Bill

@nug: Bang!  All done.  Thanks very much for this mate. Hey just a quick question..  Does Snorby end up going back and filling in the few days that were missing or is there a way I can force it to do that?  Suricata was still running during this time and has all of the alerts in the system. Barnyard2 should see the unified2 alert logs and start sending them over if they have not been auto-archived yet.  You might have to reset the place keeper by removing/resetting the waldo file.  You can probably find some more details on the web with a little searching. Bill