Introduction

In this chapter, we will cover all of the steps necessary to successfully install a functioning Snort Intrusion Detection System (IDS). We will be discussing how to install Snort on three different operating systems: Linux, OpenBSD, and Windows. Due to the overwhelming number of Linux distributions available today, installation instructions can vary from distribution to distribution, and a complete discussion of how to install Snort on all, or even most of, the available Linux distributions would be a book of its own. For this reason, we will cover the information specific to installation on the SUSE Linux 9.1 (the latest release as of the writing of this book) platform for the Linux portions of the documentation. We have chosen SUSE Linux because it is one of the most commonly used Linux distributions 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 SUSE Linux to use as a test bed for the exercises in this book, you can download it from their FTP site free of charge at ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/, or one of their many mirrors found at www.suse.com/us/private/download/ftp/int_mirrors.html. Alternately, you can purchase SUSE from software vendors such as CompUSA or the online SUSE...