Barnyard

This is a continuation of the post on installing Snort 2.9 on CentOS 6.4 (http://nkush.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/snort-29-on-centos-63.html). This post installs Barnyard2 on the host.

Barnyard is an output system for Snort. If effectively allows better snort performance by enabling Snort to produce binary output which is then processed by Barnyard.

Barnyard processes the binary Snort output files (unified2 binary) and stores the processed data into a database back-end, for example MySQL. The advantage of using Barnyard instead of the database output from Snort is that Barnyard is able to “cache” the data in case the database is unavailable.

CentOS 5.7 uses an older version of libpcap (0.9.4), but Snort’s Data Acquisition Library (daq) needs a newer version of libpcap (>=1.0.0). The latter is not an issue with the CentOS 6.0. Vishesh Kumar [1] provides an excellent instructions to getting Snort 2.9 to run on RHEL 5 (http://www.linuxmantra.com/2010/10/install-snort-29-on-rhel-5.html). The purpose of this post is not to duplicate his efforts, but to extend it slightly to include instructions for a complete Snort set-up.