

Change the declaration for EXTERNAL_NET to !$HOME_NET – this expression means the external network will be defined as any IP address that is not part of the home network.Finally, you can leave the HOME_NET declaration as “ any” if you are unable to accurately determine a specific IP range to use.If you are unsure which IP address range to specify for your home network, you can quickly check to see the IP address assigned to your computer by opening a command shell window and typing ipconfig at the prompt.In some environments (including home environments connecting to the Internet via cable modem without the use of a gateway or router) the appropriate IP address range to use may be dictated by the ISP from which you get your Internet service.In a typical large office network using network address translation, the expression will be 10.0.0.0/8.If you want to cover all IP addresses beginning with 192.168, then use the expression 192.168.0.0/16 For a typical home network, the expression will be 192.168.0.1/24 or 192.168.1.1/24 (if you’re not sure whether your third number is a 0 or 1, check your gateway/router documentation or just ping it.Change the declaration for HOME_NET to your actual home network IP address range, rather than leaving the default “ any”. The simplest way to do this is to use a CIDR format expression, to cover the entire range of relevant addresses (particularly when using Network Address Translation such as in environments protected by gateways or routers.To get running for the first time, many of the defaults can be left alone. Customize preprocessor and decoder rule setĪs you can see, there are a lot of ways to customize Snort, and making sense of the entire nf file can be a little daunting.When you open the file for viewing or editing, you will see it is organized into nine parts or steps:
#SNORT MEANING FREE#
The configuration file is plain text, so you can use any text editor to edit it, but Wordpad (or even better, the free Notepad++) is recommended at least for the first time to ensure the proper formatting is maintained (when opening the baseline nf file in Notepad all the text runs together).

#SNORT MEANING WINDOWS#
If you accepted the default locations proposed during the Windows installer execution, then the nf file will be located in the directory C:\Snort\etc. To get Snort ready to run, you need to change the default configuration settings file (which is created as part of the Snort installation) to match your local environment and operational preferences. Getting Snort installed successfully can be a challenge, but it is also only the first step in setting the tool up so you can launch it to start monitoring traffic and generating alerts.
