Comment on Internal network monitoring
irmadlad@lemmy.world 4 days ago
So, I have a standalone pFsense box running Suricata (IDS/IPS) on WAN & LAN, pfblockerng (filtering), unbound, ntopng (traffic analysis), and Tailscale as an overlay on the firewall. The servers are on their separate VLANs, IoT, phone, laptops and other devices are also isolated. On the server I run Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust, UFW, Tailscale as an overlay, and Fail2Ban. Everything is ‘default deny until something complains’. I’ve never run oPensense so I can’t speak to their software, but pFsense has been rock solid for me for years. I utilize Lnav to review logs. It’s lean, easy to install, and it just works.
To be quite honest about updates like Docker container updates, I wait until all the early adopters work out all the bugs for me and update when I feel comfortable. Updates to Ubuntu Jammy are usually straight forward and I can’t say I’ve had many issues over the years with Ubuntu Jammy updates. There may be a rare occasion, but nothing really stands out at this moment. The only issue I can think of here recently is when Docker updated but Portainer hadn’t caught up, but that was about a 30 minute fix.
It took me a while to get everything lined out from the modem to the servers, but my track record makes me feel pretty comfortable with how I have everything set up. In fact, literally most of the time, I just enjoy the set up and scout for the next project.
non_burglar@lemmy.world 4 days ago
How did you monitor your vlans with suricata? I have enough trouble tuning a couple subnets, never mind tuning for correlation between 3 or 4. This assumes you have different subnets per vlan, of course.
irmadlad@lemmy.world 4 days ago
At present I only monitor the VLAN serving the ‘computer room’ which includes the servers. It’s where all the ‘stuff’ happens so I figured I’d start with the most important. However I am in the process of learning how to SPAN (Switch Port Mirroring) where you configure your managed switch to copy traffic from specific VLAN port or all VLANs ports to a dedicated ‘monitoring port’ where a micro server is running Suricata. The mirrored traffic will retain their VLAN tags and Suricata can parse these tags.
Those are the lofty plans. LOL I’m still fiddling around with it and Suricata because you have to actually set Suricata up to be able to do that. It doesn’t right out of the box.
non_burglar@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’m not sure how far down this path you’ve gone, but suricata will not automatically correlate primitives into actual alerts from different vlans without transforms, which are cpu-intensive for what they do.
You may want to pull your tap/span/mirror from a point where they converge, like internal side of network egress.
irmadlad@lemmy.world 4 days ago
It is possible to offload the correlation to a downstream SIEM or log aggregator like Wazuh or ELK. Again, it’s something I’m currently trying to spool up on. I know it can be done, I’m just trying different things until I do get it right. I appreciate any input.