Thank you for this feedback.  There are some other posts in the Package forum where the advice for Nano users is to bump up the size of /tmp (and possibly /var) because the default partition sizes are too small to download and unzip the ever larger rules tarballs.  Unfortunately, today there is no mechanism within the pfSense Package Manager system for a package to specify prerequisites that must be satisfied in order for the package to be eligible for installation.  Some example parameters that would be useful are installed RAM and free disk space on critical partitions.

As a general statement, Snort or Suricata on a NanoBSD install will require a lot of careful attention and quite possibly some customizations such as you describe of increasing the default partition size for /tmp and also /var.

Bill

I think it was blocking itself, actually.  Fixed.

set for SRC only

@duck - where is the setting you are referring to, I see many preproc's since the upgrade when there was only 1

Yes, if you put Snort or Suricata on the WAN interface of your main office, then the package would see all traffic.  However, if you use NAT, the usefulness of the IDS is diminished a bit in that the only IP addresses you would ever see in the alerts will be those for the far-end Internet host and the WAN IP of your main office firewall.  It would be difficult in that scenario to track which host on your private LANs might be infected with or the target of malware.

If you instead run the IDS on the LAN interfaces, you would see the IP addresses before they were NAT-mangled.  With the site-to-site VPN scenario you linked, I don't if the LAN approach would work.

Bill

@Evad:

Bill,
After a total reinstall of pfSense from scratch … Snort installed like above .. Failed first time and installed on second try but no GUI... Ran the 'Reinstall Snort's GUI components' to get the GUI. Created a LAN interface and then made a WAN  'Add new interface mapping based on this one'
Now it works .... no errors so far.....

Thanks....

Glad it's working for you now, but it should not have been that much trouble the install.  Something is up somewhere and I just need to find what it is.

As for your failure to start error with this message:

snort[9610]: FATAL ERROR: /usr/pbi/snort-i386/etc/snort/snort_61288_em1/rules/snort.rules(904) Unknown rule option: 'stream_size

That indicates a needed preprocessor was not enabled.  Most likely it was the Stream5 preprocessor.  Don't know why that would be.  It is enabled by default.  The particular rule containing that rule option is on line 904 (that's what the 904 represents) in the file /usr/pbi/snort-i386/etc/snort/snort_61288_em1/rules/snort.rules.  Open that file in a text editor and go to line 904 to find the rule that generated the error.

Bill

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F.

There will be a description on the ALERTS tab for the alert generated by the IP address.  Post that alert description here.  If you are sure the alert is a false positive, you can either suppress that entire SID, or just suppress the SID when the IP matches the one in question.

Post the actual alert description that is printed along with the blocked IP either on the ALERTS tab or the BLOCKS tab.

Bill

You could probably double mod it:

10010 "content:" "content:!" 10010 "xxx" "yyy"

But, depending on how many rules you have to mod, I would personnally make a custom rule for your needs and keep the original intact. Who knows, what if the original triggers one day?

I think the answer is not quite yet…

I found this information in https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=86732.0

@gonzopancho:

QuickAssist isn't supported in pfSense today, but we are actively working on a driver (with deep assist from Intel) to go back into the FreeBSD tree.

I believe this is the last hoop to jump through before it is supported however, since according to this article it has been integrated in Snort since 2010 (Snort 2.9 Beta).

http://www.securityweek.com/sourcefire-accelerates-snort-performance-intel-pattern-matching-technology-faster-detection

Glad you found it!  Just leave Snort running on the LAN interface.  When using NAT, it will be easier to identify problem LAN hosts when Snort is on the LAN and can see the real IP addresses before they are altered by the NAT engine.

Bill

@jeffh:

Thanks fsansfil, that looks good, but it looks like there might be one more column.

Between the DPort and Class columns I have a column with large numbers. These numbers don't appear in the Alerts in the GUI, so I am having a hard time matching them up.

Any help would be appreciated.

That is the IP Header ID field.

Bill

@fsansfil is spot on with his answer.  You will find all the files in the /var/log/snort tree.  In that tree there will be a subdirectory for each configured Snort interface.  The name will be a combination of a GUID and the physical interface name (for example, em0 is one if you have an older Intel NIC).

Bill

@RayP:

The old firewall didn't load, but didn't give the same error.  I re-downloaded the AMD image and tried to load again.  The previous error is gone, but now it's stopping at "Additional Files…" with a failed message.  Since it's a new problem I'll look for a new thread that is related.

Thanks for the help.

If it fails at the "additional files…" part, that would indicate some kind of problem downloading files from the package repository server.

Bill

Oh…and one other small point.  Each time you update the Suricata package (or it gets reinstalled as part of a pfSense update), you will need to repeat the hand-edit of that /usr/local/pkg/suricata/suricata_yaml_template.inc file because it will be overwritten when Suricata is reinstalled.

Bill

Never mind… looks like it might've been something else...

From the system log...

Mar 28 14:48:45 php-fpm[44942]: /pkg_mgr_install.php: XML_RPC_Client: Connection to RPC server packages.pfsense.org:443 failed. Operation timed out 103 Mar 28 14:48:45 php-fpm[44942]: /pkg_mgr_install.php: XMLRPC communication error: Operation timed out

Another attempt a bit later worked just fine.

@jeffh:

That worked perfectly, thanks!

Glad it worked.  I added that feature a few revisions back, but it has not gotten a lot of use yet so far as I can tell.  It offers an easy way to manage rules using various lines in the enablesid.conf, disablesid.conf and modifysid.conf files.  It can work with just SID values, or you can also use regular expression matching.  This functionality was ported over from the Oinkmaster and PulledPork utilities.

Bill

@2chemlud:

Hi!

No, I had an eye on the RAM on the Dashboard, nothing went out of control. And the problem is apparently at the end of the procedure (snort is there and running, only not included in the GUI), while reinstalling the rules sets for the interfaces.

It worked fine during the update from 2.1.5 to 2.2 and from 2.2 to 2.2.1 on all three boxes. But this time…

Kind regards

I don't mean necessarily RAM as in free system memory, but rather free space on the RAM disks used for the various system partitions.  These can be filled during the package download and unpacking process.  You would really have no way of seeing them run out unless you were monitoring them in a shell session while the package installation happened in the GUI.  After Snort starts up during the installation process, it returns control to pfSense where the package manager code of pfSense completes the installation.  This last step, done by pfSense itself and not the Snort package, is where the menu entry is created under SERVICES.  That step frequently dies for some reason on Nano installs.  I think it is because of RAM disk exhaustion.  Some other users have been able to get successful installs by manually increasing their RAM disk partition sizes.  For example, increasing /tmp to 300 MB (or at least 100 MB) in size.  That is the directory partition where the package downloading, unpacking, and other temp file creation happens.  By default it is somewhat small on Nano installs.

Bill

@ghostshell:

What problems would this cause? I did do an uninstall, reboot and then reinstall. If there maybe any issues at all I would like to know so I can do a fresh install.

If your reinstall was successful, then things are OK with Snort.  If it shows up in the SERVICES menu and start normally, then it is OK.

Bill

@trvsecurity:

Sorry to be a pain, but where in the pfsense sirectory structure can I find that file so that I can edit it?

It will be in /usr/pbi/snort-amd64/etc/snort/appid/odp/libs/DetectorCommon.lua.  This is assuming you have a 64-bit install.  If you are on 32-bit architecture, change the amd64 to i386 instead.

Remember that each time the auto-update process brings down a new version of OpenAppID rules, it will wipe that directory and reload it.  So any edit to that file will be lost.  On the other hand, maybe the VRT will actually fix the problem in the next update and hand editing won't be necessary.

Bill

@trvsecurity:

This problem started with the previous version of Snort and forums said that it would be fixed however the pfsense system logs continue to fill up with the following error:

snort[12893]: server /usr/pbi/snort-i386/etc/snort/appid/odp/lua/service_EIP.lua: error validating …i/snort-i386/etc/snort/appid/odp/libs/DetectorCommon.lua:318: table index is nil

Anyone have a fix for this? Any help would be much appreciated!

See temp fix posted by another user here: https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=89393.msg499494#msg499494