Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Ubuntu: Argus 3

I'm currently working hard on network flow analysis stuff, and argus is always my best friend. Another wonderful application suite is silktools and I think you should try it out if you are into network flow analysis. Anyway here's the quick installation for upcoming argus 3 on Ubuntu 7.10.

It is pretty straight forward to get argus 3 installed -

shell>sudo apt-get install libpcap0.8 libpcap0.8-dev flex bison rrdtool

Once you have installed all the dependencies of argus 3, lets download argus 3 server and its client suite to install.

shell>wget \
ftp://qosient.com/dev/argus-3.0/argus-3.0.0.tar.gz


shell>wget \
ftp://qosient.com/dev/argus-3.0/argus-clients-3.0.0.rc.63.tar.gz


Once you have downloaded them, you just need to perform usual compilation steps by decompressing them -> configure; make && make install.

And if you still don't know what argus is about, check out this post.

P/S: Both argus and silktools are included in the HeX liveCD.

Enjoy ;]

2 comments:

Base Gent said...

I've been working with Ubuntu and Argus and found the following setting to be very helpful for dealing with missed packets.

sysctl -w net.core.rmem_max=33554432
sysctl -w net.core.rmem_default=33554432
sysctl -w net.core.netdev_max_backlog=10000

And add them to /etc/sysctl.conf too.

I got these settings from "http://www.net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de/research/hppc/" on the recommendation from some Bro presentations. Before these changes, Argus MAN records were reporting a regular amount of dropped packets.

C.S.Lee said...

Hi esteban,

Yeah, those are very useful tips for tuning. In fact you can check out the NSM wiki here too -

http://www.vorant.com/nsmwiki/Performance

Yes, argus management record is great to monitor the health of it!