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

Veronica Estrada estrada.veronica at gmail.com
Fri Nov 12 08:01:14 PST 2010


Thank you for your detailed answer.  I am doing analysis on terabytes
of data that is why i need load balance.

Could you send me the config?
Veronica


On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 2:11 AM, Tyler T. Schoenke
<Tyler.Schoenke at colorado.edu> wrote:
> 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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