Direction and IP/TCP timeout settings

Mon Jul 15 18:12:31 EDT 2013

Hey Craig,
If radium doesn't keep, the argi will drop the connections,
so unless you see radium losing its connection and 
then re-establishing, I don't think its radium.  We can measure
all of this, so its not going to be hard to track down, I don't
think.

If argus is generating the same number of flows, then its probably
seeing the same traffic.  So, it seems that we are not getting all
the packets, and it doesn't appear to be due to argus running
out of cycles.  Are we running out of memory? How does vmstat look
on the machine ??  Not swapping out ?

To understand this issue, I need to know if the pfdnacluster_master queue
is a selectable packet source, or not.  We want to use select() to get
packets, so that we can leverage the select()s timeout feature to wake
us up, periodically, so we can do some background maintenance, like queue
timeouts, etc…

When we can't select(), we have to poll the interface, and if
there isn't anything there, we could fall into a nanosleep() call,
waiting for packets.  That may be a very bad thing, causing us to
could be lose packets.

Does the pfdnacluster_master queue provide standard pcap_stats() ?
We should be able to look at the MARs, which will tell us  how
many packets the interface dropped.

Not sure that I understand the problem with multiple argus processes?
You can run 24 copies of argus, and have radium connect to them
all to recreate the single argus data stream, if that is something
you would like to do.

Lets focus on this new interface.  It could be we have to do something
special to get the best performance out of it.

Carter

On Jul 15, 2013, at 5:34 PM, Craig Merchant <cmerchant at responsys.com> wrote:

> The DNA/libzero drivers only allow a single process to connect to the “queues” that the pfdnacluster_master app presents.  The default version of their app will allow you to copy the same flow to multiple queues, but then we’d need to run 28 snort instances and 28 argus instances.  From my experience, Argus wasn’t burning that much CPU, so I opted to take advantage of the work Chris Wakelin did in modifying pfdnacluster_master so that it created a single queue with a copy of all the traffic.
>  
> Here’s the weird thing...  When argus is listening to the dna0 interface directly, it’s CPU probably runs at 30-40%.  But when I run it on the pfdnacluster_master queue, the CPU probably runs at about half that.
>  
> Yet when I look at the count of flow records for running Argus on the DNA interface vs the pfdnacluster_master queue, the volume of records is about the same.  It’s tough to test though because our traffic volume is pretty variable depending on when customers launch their campaigns.  The only way to test it for sure would be to wire the second 10g interface into the Gigamon tap, send a copy of the traffic there, and then run one instance of argus on the interface and one on pfdnacluster_master and compare them.
>  
> Is it possible that radium is getting overwhelmed?  The two argi that it connects to probably do an aggregate volume of 5-15 Gbps…  Since there is a fair bit of traffic between data centers, the dedup features of radium are helpful.  If so, how do I troubleshoot that?
>  
> I might be able to put a copy of the non-pf_ring ixgbe driver on the sensor and see how that impacts things.
>  
> Thanks for all your help!
>  
> Craig
>  
> From: Carter Bullard [mailto:carter at qosient.com] 
> Sent: Monday, July 15, 2013 1:13 PM
> To: Craig Merchant
> Cc: Argus (argus-info at lists.andrew.cmu.edu)
> Subject: Re: [ARGUS] Direction and IP/TCP timeout settings
>  
> What percent utilization do you have for argus ?
> Argus could be running out of steam and dropping packets.
> So, if you have snort running on 20+ queues to get the performance up,
> why not try to do that with argus ?
>  
> Carter
>  
> On Jul 15, 2013, at 3:49 PM, Craig Merchant <cmerchant at responsys.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> I recompiled argus after making the change to ArgusModeler.h.  Judging by the memory use, Argus is now able to use a much bigger cache for connections.  Thanks!
>  
> It hasn’t had any impact on the direction problem though.
>  
> When argus runs on top of the pfdnacluster_master app, it can’t figure out the direction about 60%+ of the time.  If I run Argus directly on the dna0 interface, it can’t figure out the direction about 40% of the time.  The pfcount utility that comes with pf_ring says that there is less than 0.1% packet loss when running on pfdnacluster_master and no packet loss when running on dna0 itself.
>  
> The interface isn’t dropping anything either:
>  
> dna0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:E0:ED:1F:60:38
>           inet6 addr: fe80::2e0:edff:fe1f:6038/64 Scope:Link
>           UP BROADCAST RUNNING PROMISC MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
>           RX packets:97888412645 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
>           TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
>           collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
>           RX bytes:63700614828375 (57.9 TiB)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
>           Memory:feaa0000-feac0000
>  
> Can you think of why Argus might have issues with pf_ring and DNA?  Any suggestions for working around it?
>  
> Thx.
> 
> Craig
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  
> From: Carter Bullard [mailto:carter at qosient.com] 
> Sent: Saturday, July 13, 2013 7:38 AM
> To: Craig Merchant
> Subject: Re: [ARGUS] Direction and IP/TCP timeout settings
>  
> Hey Craig,
> So I capped the largest timeout to be 5 minutes.  Easy fix, really sorry for the inconvenience.
>  
> The per flow timeout value is an unsigned short, (16bits), so you can use this patch
> to set timeouts up to 65534, in the file ./argus/ArgusModeler.h.
>  
> osiris:argus carter$ diff ./argus/ArgusModeler.h ./argus/ArgusModeler.h.orig
> 84c84
> < #define ARGUSTIMEOUTQS                  65534
> ---
> > #define ARGUSTIMEOUTQS                  301
>  
>  
> Carter
>  
> Carter Bullard
> CEO/President
> QoSient, LLC
> 150 E 57th Street Suite 12D
> New York, New York  10022
> 
> +1 212 588-9133 Phone
> +1 212 588-9134 Fax
>  
> On Jul 12, 2013, at 2:15 PM, Carter Bullard <carter at qosient.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Hey Craig,
> I haven't had a chance to look at the code.
> Let me see this afternoon, if its suppose to be working or not.
> Carter
> 
> Carter Bullard, QoSient, LLC
> 150 E. 57th Street Suite 12D
> New York, New York 10022
> +1 212 588-9133 Phone
> +1 212 588-9134 Fax
> 
> On Jul 12, 2013, at 1:35 PM, Craig Merchant <cmerchant at responsys.com> wrote:
> 
> I’ve been running Argus for about 18 hours now with a two hour timeout setting and there hasn’t been any change in the number of flows that it is unsure of the direction…
>  
> Let me know if there is anything I can do to help test this…
>  
> C
>  
> From: Carter Bullard [mailto:carter at qosient.com] 
> Sent: Friday, July 12, 2013 6:37 AM
> To: Craig Merchant
> Cc: Argus (argus-info at lists.andrew.cmu.edu)
> Subject: Re: [ARGUS] Direction and IP/TCP timeout settings
>  
> Hmmmm, do the new timeouts change the direction problem?
> That will be the real test, if the memory issues aren't showing themselves,
> the cool, as long as your traffic looks better.
>  
> If not, I'll take a look.  Never know where things break down.
> In some cases, we'll try to make the direction indicator match the traffic,
> with the central character indicating the confidence.  So, when there is
> a " ? ", the < or > should change to indicate direction of traffic, since
> the assignment of flow direction isn't " on ".
>  
> Carter
>  
>  
> On Jul 11, 2013, at 7:28 PM, Craig Merchant <cmerchant at responsys.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Hey, Carter…
>  
> We’re finding that for about 70% of our flows, Argus can’t figure out the direction.  From previous posts, it would seem that the 60 second TCP session timeout is too short.  If I understand correctly, a flow longer than 60 seconds will have its session timeout in the cache and then argus can’t really determine what the direction is.
>  
> The argus.conf file warns of the hit on memory if those settings are adjusted from the defaults.  I’ve been steadily increasing the TCP and IP timeout values and watching to see if memory consumption jumps up dramatically or if we’re seeing less events where the direction is uncertain.
>  
> I’ve gone as high up as two hour session timeout.  We do something like 2.5-8 Gbps 24 hours a day, so I would expect to see a huge increase in Argus memory consumption when increase the timeout value.  The machine has like 64 GB of memory and top says argus is only using .2%. 
>  
> The settings look like:
>  
> ARGUS_IP_TIMEOUT=3600
> ARGUS_TCP_TIMEOUT=7200
> #ARGUS_ICMP_TIMEOUT=5
> #ARGUS_IGMP_TIMEOUT=30
> #ARGUS_FRAG_TIMEOUT=5
> #ARGUS_ARP_TIMEOUT=5
> #ARGUS_OTHER_TIMEOUT=30
>  
> Am I doing something wrong here?  Is there some other setting I need to enable to increase that timeout value?
>  
> Also, what’s the difference between a direction value of ?> vs <?>?
>  
> Thanks!
>  
> Craig
>  

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