Monthly Archives: September 2008

New Vuurmuur version numbering scheme

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Today I’ve changed the versioning scheme for Vuurmuur. I was unhappy with the scheme for quite some time already. Versions like 0.5.73 are not making much sense in my view. Originally, my intention was to have a scheme like the linux kernel at the time had. Even versions for stable releases, odd versions for unstable/development releases. The idea was that the 0.5.x development series would some day become a 0.6 stable, after which the 0.7 development series would begin. Of course, that never happened. Instead, I added the alpha releases that became the real development releases and the 0.5.x effectively became the stable releases. So we ended up with releases like 0.5.74 alpha 6. In my opinion quite confusing.

The new scheme is a lot simpler. There will be a two digit version number with optionally a suffix for development releases. The next stable release will be 0.6. In the path to it, there will be 0.6betaX releases and 0.6rcX releases. After the 0.6 release the next will be 0.7 and so on. After 0.9 the next is 1.0, so no more .74 releases 😉

I’ve released 0.6rc1 today, and expect 0.6 stable to be out shortly.

Snort_inline load balancing

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Dave Remien of NitroSecurity created a patch that “implements a relatively simple form of (IPV4) load balancing” between multiple Snort_inline processes using Nfqueue. Here is what it does:

1. Load balancing. The bottom half of the source and dest addresses are added together, and mod’d with the number of “load-balancing” snorts you desire to run. This means that traffic stays with a particular snort, so that state is maintained.

2. Because you can run many snorts (presumably on many CPUs), you can now take advantage of that super-hooty 16way box and those 10 gig NICs you just got your hands on…

3. The snort at the “magicqueue” is a back-up snort – normally no traffic is sent to it, but in the event that one of the “load-balancing” snorts isn’t present, the traffic for that “load-balancing” snort gets sent to the “backup” snort.

And even more, read that here.

I haven’t tried this myself, but it sure looks cool. Try it by checking out the latest SVN code for Snort_inline. Then follow the instructions from README.NFQUEUE.

Big thanks to Dave Remien & NitroSecurity for this contribution!