Chapter 30: Installing Snort

Introduction

In this chapter, we cover all of the steps necessary to complete a functioning Snort Intrusion Detection System (IDS) install. Due to the overwhelming amount of Linux distributions available today, installation instructions can vary from distribution to distribution, and are beyond the scope of this chapter. For this reason, we will cover the information specific to installation on the Red Hat 8.0 platform for the Linux portions of the documentation. We have chosen Red Hat because it is the most commonly used Linux distribution in the world, and serves as a good starting point on which to base further installations. Most of what we cover here should apply to most other popular distributions without a huge amount of modification; if the instructions do vary, it will be minimal. We will go into a bit more detail later in this introduction. As a side note, if you would like to acquire Red Hat Linux to use as a test bed for the exercises in this book, you can download it from one of their mirrors free of charge at www.redhat.com/download/mirror.html. Alternately, you can purchase the full package, complete with support, from most computer software retailers. As advocates of Linux and free software, we recommend the latter if you really enjoy the product. Your contributions help to keep the whole thing going, and at a less than $40.00 USD, you can't go wrong.

Let's take a moment to introduce you to the way we approached this chapter. We know that not everyone is a Linux guru, and we do not expect you to understand everything (we don't even understand everything), so we tried to approach almost every subject as if we were learning it for the first time. Our only assumption is that you do have a basic understanding of the operating system (OS) and the basic operation of it. Knowing that this can be redundant information for those of you who are already comfortable with the terminology and procedures, we made the step-by-step instructions for each install easy to find and read. This chapter will serve as an excellent skimming reference for that crowd. The only time we get wordy with the procedures is when there is possibly some pitfall to watch for, or maybe some side notes that might be helpful. We keep all of our lengthy descriptions and discussions outside of the documentation.

As with any other common package installation, it is best to start with a solid OS installation. Please make sure that your OS is current and error free. For this installation, you must first verify that your networking setup on the target machine is up to date and functioning properly.

The packages you will need for installing Snort IDS are all available free of charge on the Internet at their respective Web sites.