Snort mailing list archives

Re: Drifting timestamps


From: Martin Roesch <roesch () sourcefire com>
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 11:53:14 -0400

Hi Jacob,

It could be but IIRC Barnyard is just reading the timestamps from the unified files for its insertions. I just checked the code and Barnyard's ACID database plugin gets timestamps from the unified file. Might be MySQL, but that would be weird...

     -Marty

On Oct 18, 2004, at 3:18 PM, Jacob Roberts wrote:

We check the timezones and clocks of all the systems involved. They are
all correct and don't drift from day to day.

They daily routine is to Stop barnyard, stop snort, drop the Mysql
database(not just deleted the records), re-create the database, start
snort, start barnyard.

At the time everything is restarted the timestamps are in sync with
correct time.  As the system runs the timestamps drift

We've narrowed it down to on of the following:
        1. Something weird in Snort (probably not)
        2. Something in Barnyard (we've no idea)
        3. Something in Mysql. (We've added a timestamp column to the
event table and it auto-inserted correct timestamps. So we don't thing
its Mysql)

Could this be a Barnyard thing?

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Roesch [mailto:roesch () sourcefire com]
Sent: Sunday, October 17, 2004 9:10 AM
To: Jacob Roberts
Cc: snort-users () lists sourceforge net
Subject: Re: [Snort-users] Drifting timestamps


Hi Jake,

That'd have to be the system clock on the sensor drifting, the
timestamps that Snort uses is based on a call to gettimeofday() that
libpcap performs when it receives a new packet.  Snort has no internal
time tracking mechanisms and in fact we take advantage of the fact that
libpcap gives us time data "for free" to track time inside Snort.

       -Marty


On Oct 15, 2004, at 6:50 PM, Jacob Roberts wrote:

We have a snort setup with barnyard which dumps in to a MySQL
database. We stop snort and barnyard each day, delete the database,
re-create it, then restart snort and barnyard.

As snort runs through the day we start to see the timestamps of alerts

drift behind actual time.  We aren't receiving an excessive amount of
alerts so we ruled out Barnyard not being able to keep up with the
alerts generated by Snort (I don't know if that would happen anyways)

Has anyone had anything like this happen?  We haven't been able to
track
it down and aren't sure what to do.

Thanks,
Jake Roberts
Brigham Young University
jake_roberts () byu edu


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--
Martin Roesch - Founder/CTO, Sourcefire Inc. - +1-410-290-1616
Sourcefire - Discover.  Determine.  Defend. roesch () sourcefire com -
http://www.sourcefire.com
Snort: Open Source Network IDS - http://www.snort.org


--
Martin Roesch - Founder/CTO, Sourcefire Inc. - +1-410-290-1616
Sourcefire - Discover.  Determine.  Defend.
roesch () sourcefire com - http://www.sourcefire.com
Snort: Open Source Network IDS - http://www.snort.org



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