Compiling Suricata 0.9.0 in Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 in IDS mode

Posted on May 7, 2010

Note: the difference with the 0.8.2 post is that addition of libcap-ng-dev. This allows Suricata to run as an unprivileged user.

Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS looks like a good platform for running an IDS on. It’s up to date and has long term support. Here is how to compile and install Suricata 0.9.0 on it.

Install the following packages needed to build Suricata: libpcre3-dev libpcap-dev libyaml-dev zlib1g-dev libcap-ng-dev.

apt-get install libpcre3-dev libpcap-dev libyaml-dev zlib1g-dev libcap-ng-dev

Download Suricata 0.9.0 here

Extract the suricata-0.9.0.tar.gz file as follows:

tar xzvf suricata-0.9.0.tar.gz

Enter the extracted directory suricata-0.9.0.

Run “./configure” Note that you may get a warning about libnet 1.1 that is missing. You can ignore that, it’s only used in IPS/inline mode currently. If “./configure” was succesful, run “make” If “make” was succesful, run “sudo make install” Except for Suricata itself, the build process installed “libhtp”. For that to work properly, run “ldconfig”.

Run “suricata -V” and it should report version 0.9.0.

To use Suricata in IDS mode, pass -i to the command line. Example

suricata -c /etc/suricata/suricata.yaml -i eth0