cipherdyne.org

Michael Rash, Security Researcher



Software Release - psad-2.1.1

Software Release - psad-2.1.1 The 2.1.1 release of psad is ready for download. This release focuses on support for some of the latest Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu 7.10 and Fedora 8. There is also a new mode that allows psad to collect iptables logging data directly from a file that is written to by syslog instead of via the previous named pipe data collection mechanism. Here is the complete ChangeLog:
  • Added a new feature whereby psad can acquire iptables log data just by parsing an existing file (/var/log/messages by default) that is written to by syslog. By default, psad acquires iptables log data from the /var/log/psad/fwdata file which is written to by kmsgsd, but on some systems, having syslog communicate log data to kmsgsd can be problematic since syslog configs and external factors such as Apparmor and SELinux can play a role here. This new feature is controled by two new configuration variables "ENABLE_SYSLOG_FILE" (to enable/disable the feature) and "IPT_SYSLOG_FILE" to specifiy the path to the file to parse.
  • Better installation support for various Linux distributions including Fedora 8 and Ubuntu. The current runlevel is now acquired via the "runlevel" command instead of attempting to read /etc/inittab (which does not even exist on Ubuntu 7.10), and there are new command line arguments --init-dir, --init-name, and --runlevel to allow the init directory, init script name, and the runlevel to be manually specified on the install.pl command line.
  • Updated psad to automatically handle situations where the either the /var/log/psad/fwdata file or the /var/log/messages file (whichever syslog is writing iptables log messages to) gets rotated. The filehandle is closed and reopened if the file shrinks or if the inode changes. This strategy is borrowed from how the fwknop project deals with the filesystem packet capture file.
  • Minor bugfix to generate syslog message when restarting a psad process.
  • Updated install.pl to set the LC_ALL environmental variable to "C" This should address some issues with installing psad on non-English locale systems.
  • Updated install.pl to be compatible with the rsyslog daemon, which is commonly installed on Fedora 8 systems.