[Bro] Dropping packets - How do I leverage multiple core with BRO?

Tyler T. Schoenke Tyler.Schoenke at colorado.edu
Thu Nov 11 09:11:55 PST 2010


This may be possible.  I just Googled and saw there is a program called
tcprelay that can be used to feed a pcap into an Ethernet interface. 
You could use tcprelay to feed the pcap into the Click! Modular Router
and have Click! load balance the traffic to a Bro cluster with many
workers to utilize all your cores. 

The cluster is quite easy to set up, and the Click! interface config is
pretty easy as well.  I have a cluster of seven workers running on seven
of the cores in my server.  The eighth runs Click!.  The cluster manager
and proxy run on a recycled lab workstation with a big hard drive. 

If you are interested, I can send a copy of my Click! configuration.  It
is a modified version of Justin's that was posted to the list a while back.

Using this type of setup, you could run the Bro manager, proxy(ies) as
well as 12 or 13 worker processes and Click! all on the same server. 
The only reason I moved my manager and proxy off was to have more
workers processing traffic.  I think this will work with FreeBSD or
Linux.  Click! kernel mode requires Linux, but I don't think the load
balancing uses kernel drivers. 

You can grep the notice.log for Dropped to see how much traffic is not
being processed.  I don't recall the script that logs that, but it is
probably drop.bro.  I think it is on by default with the cluster config.

Tyler

--
Tyler Schoenke
Network Security Analyst
IT Security Office
University of Colorado - Boulder


On 11/11/2010 12:58 AM, Veronica Estrada wrote:
> Hello BRO professionals,
>
> I am using BRO v 1.5.1 to analyze off-line pcap files. When I run BRO
> on 4Gb pcap file, one CPU core always reaches 100% but the server
> still has more 15 idle cores.
> The analysis uses brolite, dpd and detect-protocols.
>
> I am afraid BRO is loosing packets. By the way, how can I measure
> packet dropping?
>
> The capture-loss generates this notice:
> no=CaptureLossSummary na=NOTICE_ALARM_ALWAYS msg=estimated\ rate\ \=\
> 0.0082201 tag=@36-6fb3-4a
>
> Are this events or bytes? WHy indicates tag? I cannot find any
> reference to this tag in any of the other logs. By reading the
> documentation, it seems you don't recommend this metric.
> Instead, I will be happy to know the number of packets that BRO
> processed. I cannot find where is this number logged.
>
> Best regards
>
> Veronica Estrada
> Nakao's Laboratory
> Univ. of Tokyo
> _______________________________________________
> Bro mailing list
> bro at bro-ids.org
> http://mailman.ICSI.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/bro
>
>   



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