Suricata ~ Updates Killing Network Connections
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@Gertran is on the right track. Suricata needs a good bit of CPU horsepower, and the more rules you enable the more horsepower it needs. That needed horsepower includes a pretty fast and capable CPU along with plenty of RAM. I would say 2GB is cutting it close on RAM. I would rather have at least 4GB of RAM for Suricata with a lot of rules enabled.
Are any other packages running on this firewall? That can further add to load, and if you have another package that needs to download daily updates (such as IP lists or something), then perhaps there is a conflict with the update jobs ???
Bill
Hello Bill,
This is a brand new Micro PC I propped up in late 2017 and the hardware specification are these:
Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU E3845 @ 1.91GHz
4 CPUs: 1 package(s) x 4 core(s)
AES-NI CPU Crypto: Yes (active)The amount of RAM might be an issue. It really depends on the number of enabled rules. When the scheduled updates run, Suricata basically has to load both sets of rules into memory at the same time, then when everything is loaded up it switches over to using the new rules in RAM and discards the old ones. So for a brief period of time you need almost twice as much RAM as compared to the rest of the running time. With a limited amount of RAM to start with, this could result in memory paging (the swapping in and out to disk of some RAM content). Your power spike is simply the physical evidence of the much higher CPU workload during the task. A higher CPU workload is normal for rule updates.
Bill
Hello Bill,
My apologies I didn't state how much RAM I have on board. This Micro PC has 8 GB of RAM which should be more than plenty to run pfSense.
OK, 8 GB should be plenty of RAM. A spike in CPU usage and power consumption would be normal, but losing network connectivity is not normal. That has not been reported by others so far as I can tell, so it appears to be isolated to your case. Is there anything unusual about your network card? Is it a USB device or a standard port on the motherboard? Are you using blocking mode for Suricata or just the default IDS mode? This is set on the INTERFACE SETTINGS tab for each configured Suricata interface. You have a choice of two blocking modes when you enable "Block Offenders". Those two modes are Legacy Mode and Inline IPS Mode. If you have blocking configured, which of those two modes do you have enabled?
Bill
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Block Offenders is not checked on either LAN / WAN interface. The Micro PC has four on board Intel WG82583 NIC's.
Thank You!
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Block Offenders is not checked on either LAN / WAN interface. The Micro PC has four on board Intel WG82583 NIC's.
Thank You!
With that basic setup (no blocking), I really can't imagine a scenario where Suricata could break your network connectivity. In that default setup you have, it only launches libpcap to get copies of packets coming through the interface so it can analyze them. That's it. Are you 100% positive Suricata is the issue? I know of nothing within the binary that can break your network connectivity, especially with blocking not enabled. In the GUI, even if that code got really intense, the worst that should happen is the GUI responsivness would suck for a few seconds.
When you say the network "breaks", does it self recover? In other words, will connectivity come back if you do nothing? If not, what do you do to restore connectivity? Those can be troubleshooting hints.
Bill
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Hello Bill,
When the system is updating all networking is halted specifically anything to do with WiFi. If I'm watching Netflix on my LG smart TV the only way to restore the connection is to cycle power to the TV. This same behavior is seen on two smart weather stations I am beta testing.
On those specific devices I can see the hubs showing a red LED.
A red LED indicates on those specific pieces of hardware that the hub is not able to connect to the WiFi network / communicate to the weather servers.
The only remedy is to cycle power to those two hubs to establish a WiFi connection. Since I started this thread this problem has not reappeared due to the fact I have pushed the Suricata update to 29 days etc.
Any further insight is greatly appreciated!
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More insight is going to take some additional info from logs and recreating the event more often than every 29 days.
If you are game, change the interval back to every 6 or 12 hours and change the time for the update to coincide with a period when you are available to login to the firewall and see what's happening and grab some log info during the issue. Specifically I need to see the system log entries during the time the loss of connectivity is happening along with your suricata.log file for the interface.
The system log for pfSense is under STATUS >> SYSTEM LOGS. You can find the Suricata log I need under the LOGS VIEW tab and then select the suricata.log file in the drop-down selector. The system log will likely contain the most relevant info. Just remember to capture the info during the time the connectivity problem is happening. Feel free to obfuscate IP addresses if you want to.
Bill
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More insight is going to take some additional info from logs and recreating the event more often than every 29 days.
If you are game, change the interval back to every 6 or 12 hours and change the time for the update to coincide with a period when you are available to login to the firewall and see what's happening and grab some log info during the issue. Specifically I need to see the system log entries during the time the loss of connectivity is happening along with your suricata.log file for the interface.
The system log for pfSense is under STATUS >> SYSTEM LOGS. You can find the Suricata log I need under the LOGS VIEW tab and then select the suricata.log file in the drop-down selector. The system log will likely contain the most relevant info. Just remember to capture the info during the time the connectivity problem is happening. Feel free to obfuscate IP addresses if you want to.
Bill
Hi Bill,
Apologies for the tardy reply I've been on the road for work for several weeks. Upon my return I shall follow your suggestions and it should be noted since moving the update interval to 29 days. Nothing bad has happen to any network appliance in the home. Since my last reply that very much affirms this issue is directly related to the update.
Thank You!
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I am having issues with apparently random killing all network connections with 2.4.2p1 also, but I'm not sure it is Suricata doing it. For my system it happens at a seemingly random time from 1-10 days. I have been unable to correlate it to any cron job, and the logs do not show anything except the gateway is down when it happens. For mine the network interface outage usually lasts 1-2 minutes, though at least once I had to reboot. The system at the console thinks all is fine, and there are no crashes. I've tried different hardware including swapping servers and network cards, but the issue persists. Kinda hard to troubleshoot with the frequency so far apart, and no known way of inducing the error.
Hardware: HP DL380 G6, 48 Gig memory, Xeon 5650x2, Intel i340 4 port network cards x 2.
Packages: pfBlockerNG 2.1.2_2, mailreport 3.1, Suricata 4.0.3_1 -
So why is the gateway down? Do you have State killing on gateway failure enabled?
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The gateways appear to go down because all of the Interfaces stop passing traffic (not just the WAN gateways). I currently have 4 physical interfaces configured. 2 WAN, 1 LAN, and 1 LAN that is just for management of the firewall (no NAT, no Suricata). The 2 LAN interfaces are configured as VLANS. When the issue occurs, I lose connectivity to the management LAN as well (no Suricata on that interface). Typically I will start to see packet loss on 1 gateway and within seconds the other, then all go down including the LAN's for about a minute. I know the LAN's go down as I have a separate Zabbix server pinging, and I cannot reach the web GUI until back up. I have verified that when this occurs the switch and server Ethernet ports do not lose physical connectivity.
As for "State killing on gateway failure enabled?", in Suricata I do have the "Kill States" checked which is the default. However, that should have no effect on the Interfaces that are not set up to be monitored by Suricata, and those go down as well. Do you recommend turning "Kill States" off?
Also in my case if it helps, using Suricata in Legacy mode.
Another anomaly which may/may not be related: After a server restart Suricata does not show any blocks. It shows alerts, but no blocks. If I restart the Suricata service, it works normally and shows blocks (I am only blocking mostly p2p). This morning I updated to Suricata 4.0.3_2 but it did not change this behavior.
I don't know if this is the same issue as Teken's or not, but it looked similar so I thought I'd throw this out there.
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@RichH:
Another anomaly which may/may not be related: After a server restart Suricata does not show any blocks. It shows alerts, but no blocks. If I restart the Suricata service, it works normally and shows blocks (I am only blocking mostly p2p). This morning I updated to Suricata 4.0.3_2 but it did not change this behavior.
I don't know if this is the same issue as Teken's or not, but it looked similar so I thought I'd throw this out there.
What server are talking about restarting? Is it the box hosting pfSense and Suricata? When you say you "restart Suricata", is it showing as running on the interface when you click the restart icon or is it showing as not running and you click the start icon?
In regards to "showing alerts but no blocks", you do realize that the ALERTS tab is reading from a log file. So if that log file is not erased during a reboot of the firewall the alerts in the log file will be displayed on the ALERTS tab after the reboot. New alerts at the top and older ones at the bottom. The BLOCKS tab, on the other hand, literally reads the contents of the packet filter firewall's snort2c table and displays those. After a reboot, the snort2c table is cleared out until network traffic triggers more alerts which the result in blocks. So after a firewall reboot and before any new alerts have been received, the BLOCKS tab will be empty.
Bill
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The "server" is the HP G6 box running pfSense, sorry I didn't make that clear. As for Suricata "showing alerts but no blocks" – they are not logs but current alerts that can be seen by the date and time. I even tested going to do a P2P download (which is set to be blocked by Suricata) just to be sure. It is logged in the alerts, but not in the "Blocks" section. I restart the Suricata service from Status-Services and then do the test again. The Block now shows. It is a reproducible issue. I just wish the killed network connections was something I knew how to reproduce, as I presume once it can be reproduced it can be fixed!
Thanks much!
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@RichH:
The "server" is the HP G6 box running pfSense, sorry I didn't make that clear. As for Suricata "showing alerts but no blocks" – they are not logs but current alerts that can be seen by the date and time. I even tested going to do a P2P download (which is set to be blocked by Suricata) just to be sure. It is logged in the alerts, but not in the "Blocks" section. I restart the Suricata service from Status-Services and then do the test again. The Block now shows. It is a reproducible issue. I just wish the killed network connections was something I knew how to reproduce, as I presume once it can be reproduced it can be fixed!
Thanks much!
Yes, they are logs. Every single alert shown on that tab is read from an alert log file in /var/logs/suricata and sub-directories present there for each interface. The PHP code on the ALERTS tab opens the current log file and reads it into memory and displays the contents. That is the only place alerts are pulled from (the log files). As for blocks, when the BLOCKS tab loads and renders in browser, PHP code is executed that reads the snort2c table from pfSense, loads its contents (IP addresses) into an array and displays the IP addresses it found. Those are the "blocks" displayed. Here is a snippet of the actual code that does that:
exec("/sbin/pfctl -t snort2c -T show", $blocked_ips);I'm having a very difficult time reconciling what you describe with how the internals of the code actually works. Something is not quite right in your setup perhaps. For starters, when you see this behavior and go to the INTERFACES tab, what icon is showing for each of the Suricata-enabled interfaces? Is it a green check or is it a red X? Green means Suricata is running, red X means it is not or has died. Do you run any other packages on this firewall? One package known to cause issues with Snort and Suricata both is the Service Watchdog package. It will start multiple copies of Suricata that then fight with each other.
Bill
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Thanks Bill. The 2 Suricata Interfaces I have set up to use are each showing a green check (1 WAN and 1 LAN), and have been green even when I have had issues. I presume Suricata is working as the current alerts show up even when the blocks do not. For packages I have only these 3:
pfBlockerNG 2.1.2_2
mailreport 3.1
Suricata 4.0.3_2 (though I see an update to 4.04 is available which I'll apply later today)I had to restart this morning but did not get to check right away; when I did it was working so maybe it is not consistent or takes a while to start working again or something.
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Hi SuperTechie,
I'm having the same issues where the Suricata update is taking my interfaces down. Did you find a fix? Here are my pfSense/package versions:
Netgate SG-8860
2.4.2-RELEASE-p1
Suricata security 4.0.4My system logs make it seem like Suricata is the cause.
System Logs:
018-08-01 00:31:52.000 stjomocpfwm.npgco.com
SuricataStartup[56447]: Suricata STOP for WAN809(31583_igb3)...
2018-08-01 00:31:52.000 stjomocpfwm.npgco.com
suricata[12157]: [100193] <Notice> -- Signal Received. Stopping engine.
2018-08-01 00:31:51.000 stjomocpfwm.npgco.com
kernel: igb1: link state changed to DOWN
2018-08-01 00:31:51.000 stjomocpfwm.npgco.com
check_reload_status: Linkup starting igb1
2018-08-01 00:31:51.000 stjomocpfwm.npgco.com
suricata[10428]: [101459] <Notice> -- Stats for 'igb1': pkts: 134461382, drop: 256 (0.00%), invalid chksum: 0
2018-08-01 00:31:51.000 stjomocpfwm.npgco.com
kernel: igb1: promiscuous mode disabled
2018-08-01 00:31:51.000 stjomocpfwm.npgco.com
suricata[10428]: [101459] <Info> -- cleaning up signature grouping structure... complete
2018-08-01 00:31:50.000 stjomocpfwm.npgco.com
SuricataStartup[54412]: Suricata STOP for WAN801(9911_igb1)...
2018-08-01 00:31:50.000 stjomocpfwm.npgco.com
suricata[10428]: [101459] <Notice> -- Signal Received. Stopping engine.
2018-08-01 00:31:50.000 stjomocpfwm.npgco.com
suricata[10428]: [100791] <Info> -- (RX#01-igb1) Pcap Total:134458188 Recv:134457932 Drop:256 (0.0%).
2018-08-01 00:31:50.000 stjomocpfwm.npgco.com
php-cgi: suricata_check_for_rule_updates.php: [Suricata] Building new sid-msg.map file for WAN809...
2018-08-01 00:31:41.000 stjomocpfwm.npgco.com
php-cgi: suricata_check_for_rule_updates.php: [Suricata] Updating rules configuration for: WAN809 ...
2018-08-01 00:31:40.000 stjomocpfwm.npgco.com
php-cgi: suricata_check_for_rule_updates.php: [Suricata] Building new sid-msg.map file for WAN801...
2018-08-01 00:31:31.000 stjomocpfwm.npgco.com
php-cgi: suricata_check_for_rule_updates.php: [Suricata] Removed 51 obsoleted rules category files.
2018-08-01 00:31:31.000 stjomocpfwm.npgco.com
php-cgi: suricata_check_for_rule_updates.php: [Suricata] Updating rules configuration for: WAN801 ... -
@jaredw said in Suricata ~ Updates Killing Network Connections:
2018-08-01 00:31:51.000 stjomocpfwm.npgco.com
kernel: igb1: link state changed to DOWNLooks like it's actually taking the link down there.
However is there a reason you're running 2.4.2 still?
This is the 2.4 development board, currently 2.4.4a.Steve
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Hi Steve,
No reason other than we have many of these firewalls in production and haven't gotten to updating. I'll update one and see if the problem goes away and keep you posted.
