[Bro] bro cluster setup questions

OpenShift Ninja openshift.ninja at gmail.com
Mon Sep 17 09:59:51 PDT 2018


A while back I asked some questions about setting up Bro clusters in
containers. Let me explain my setup a little and then I can ask my
questions.

I have a cluster of like 40 machines. We have a ton of traffic that will be
coming into that cluster and distributed to the NICs on all host hosts. So
my plan was to have a worker on each host processing traffic and then
sending that traffic to either a logger or a manager (given the size of the
cluster, I think a separate logger is warranted). I also would have one ore
more proxies.

We are using Mesos/Marathon to deploy containers onto the cluster. I can in
theory pin containers to given hosts, although I would prefer to let
Marathon manage that if I can. From my experience though, having a manager
container and a logger container running on the same host means that Bro
will ignore the logger and just use the manager (i.e., I find the logs
being collected on the manager).

I've been initializing the cluster by having sshd running inside each of
the containers and then running broctl install and deploy from inside the
manager (and I have the sshd listening on 2022 instead of 22 since we
already have sshd running on the machines the containers are running on - I
have an ssh config inside of the manager container that makes 2022 the
default port to use).

This will work fine as long as I only have one bro container on each host
in my cluster. If I need to run more than one on any server, then it no
longer makes sense. When I asked about this a while back, someone had
mentioned that you can initialize the cluster without ssh. How do you do
that exactly? Put the node.cfg on each of the hosts and then run broctl
install on each? I'm a little confused on how each node knows what type of
host it is supposed to be, other than consulting the node.cfg file and
seeing the host/type relationship (but if you have the logger and proxy on
the same host, how do they know which is which?).

The cluster configuration documentation (
https://www.bro.org/sphinx-git/configuration/index.html
<https://www.bro.org/sphinx-git/configuration/index.html_>) and the broctl
documentation (https://www.bro.org/sphinx-git/components/broctl/README.html)
doesn't really make it clear to me how this works.
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