Re: How to reduce the binary size of snort?

[Jason Brvenik <jasonb () sourcefire com>]

Top posting to annoy Randal. ( I'll do it my way, you are free to do
it yours. The line comes quickly when you try to impose your way on
others, you will get voted out with your party.)

I will follow with in-line responses to illustrate that I really think
it is and should be conversational. Modern mail handlers should be
able to follow indenting and responses appropriately.

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 6:40 PM, Randal T. Rioux<randy () procyonlabs com> wrote:
> Leon Ward wrote:
> > What's your device?
>
> Don't top-post. See rest of comment(s) below.

Perhaps this is relevant because mentioning a device opens up a
different avenue of suggestion, maybe even someone else has done it on
the specific device. I don't see anything in the thread to challenge
the question as irrelevant or avoiding. I've made snort run on
linksys, Soekris, Verizon wireless routers, and a slew of off brand
devices. I doubt I could make modern full featured versions run in the
constraints presented by those devices.

> > On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 6:23 AM, S U B A <jv.suri () gmail com
> > <mailto:jv.suri () gmail com>> wrote:
> >
> >     Hi ,
> >           I`m trying to fit snort in our device and we have some space
> >     constrains with this. Thats why I wanted to know why the current
> >     snort size is very large, previously i used snort_inline 2.6 version
> >     which of size 1.7 Mb. I wanted to know why the current version is so
> >     huge when compared to older versions.

There have been huge refractors to support new capabilities. I suspect
many of them in support of dynamic plugins. Have you tried
--disable-dynamicplugin with configure to reduce the size?

> >     Thanks and Regards,
> >     Suresh Babu

Sure! Don't feel alienated either, it can be difficult to get
responses as most are busy with work and life and your request is not
exactly typical. It also is probably better fielded to
snort-devel () lists sourceforge net as the development folks routinely
read those posts.

> >     On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 3:22 PM, Nigel Houghton
> >     <nhoughton () sourcefire com <mailto:nhoughton () sourcefire com>> wrote:
> >
> >         On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 7:39 AM, S U B A<jv.suri () gmail com
> >         <mailto:jv.suri () gmail com>> wrote:
> >         > Hello All,
> >         >              Currently snort binary size after compilation is
> >         8652 Kb (FC9
> >         > and 2.6.25.11 kernel), after stripping it is 6488 Kb. How to
> >         reduce the size
> >         > of the snort binary?
> >         > The parser.c is of 268 Kb and why the parser.o is of size 5824
> >         Kb?? I think
> >         > because of this parser.o the snort binary size is very large.
> >         > Can anyone give some suggestions on how to reduce the size of
> >         snort binary?
> >
> >         Why do you want to do this? Why do you believe it is too large? What
> >         is it that you, who is "new to snort", are trying to do?

The answer to Nigel is simple, because the available space for the
project is not big enough to accommodate the new binary size. Perhaps
Nigel missed the inference and is in fact provably flawed like the
rest of us. Could that be a possibility?

> The most annoying thing in the world to me is when people answer "how
> to" questions with "why" answers. If you don't know the answer, then
> don't spam the list. Most of us choose this field because of the
> creativity it allows us to engage in, not to find out how many ways we
> can avoid a challenge.

The most annoying thing in the world to me: People with opinions that
often do not bear out in fact disregarding the potentially valuable
contribution of others because they have a bias.

If you truly want to engage in creativity let the creativity manifest
in any way it can for different people. Getting snippy, on your soap
box, pedantic, religious about posts and methods, etc, and then
copping out with an obvious response followed by "I don't have time"
is just a cop out because you had a bad day. Stubborn can be good in
the creativity process, being an ass about it rarely is. (Trust me, I
know this from experience!)

> That being said, look through the CVS logs to see when massive changes
> may have occurred, like for parser.c:

Massive indeed. It is a 2.5M diff through viewcvs

http://cvs.snort.org/viewcvs.cgi/snort/src/parser.c.diff?r1=1.161&r2=1.122.2.13

> http://cvs.snort.org/viewcvs.cgi/snort/src/parser.c
>
> I don't have the time right now to dig through it, but hopefully this
> can help a little bit.
>
> And remember, if someone wants to try and run Snort on a toaster, don't
> ask why... ask how you can help!

Way to set the example!

A challenge I think that will exist in solving the need is that the
bounds are unknown. A guess is that getting creative about making
snort smaller will more than likely mean giving up functionality. Two
things are unknown that would help.

What are the space requirements?
What is the required functionality?

RE Functionality, further questions may help define the goal.
  - Just rules?
  - Preprocessors?
  - Normalization?
  - simple pattern matching?
  - Track recent rule updates?

Etc

> Randy
>
>
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