Anonymization of argus flow data

Carter Bullard carter at qosient.com
Tue Oct 15 15:24:29 EDT 2013


Hey Kaustubh,
I haven't found anything that would generate obvious delays in the algorithms.
How many IP addresses are we talking about??

racount -M addr -r input.argus

Carter


On Oct 8, 2013, at 2:11 PM, Kaustubh Gadkari <kaustubh at cs.colostate.edu> wrote:

> Hey Carter,
> 
> I don't have a .rarc file, and I am not setting RA_PRINT_NAMES explicitly anywhere. My invocation of ranonymize is as follows:
> 
> ranonymize -f /path/to/configfile -r input.argus -w output.argus - <filter expression>
> 
> The config file has the following entries:
> RANON_PRESERVE_ETHERNET_VENDOR=yes
> RANON_PRESERVE_BROADCAST_ADDRESS=yes
> RANON_NET_ANONYMIZATION=sequential
> RANON_HOST_ANONYMIZATION=sequential
> RANON_PRESERVE_NET_ADDRESS_HIERARCHY=class
> 
> Thanks,
> Kaustubh
> 
> 
> On Oct 8, 2013, at 10:04 AM, Carter Bullard <carter at qosient.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hey Kaustubh,
>> There is a chance that if you run ranonymize() with the options to
>> print hostnames, either in the .rarc file or using the -nn option
>> on the command line, you will hurt ranonymize's performance by doing
>> bind lookups on each address before the number is translated.
>> 
>> Any chance that is going on here?  What is the value of your RA_PRINT_NAMES
>> variable in your .rarc, and/or how are you calling ranonymize() ?
>> 
>> Carter
>> 
>> 
>> On Oct 8, 2013, at 8:45 AM, Carter Bullard <carter at qosient.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Hey Kaustubh,
>>> I have not had a chance, but thanks for reminding me.
>>> I'll look at it today !!!!  Keep bugging me !!!
>>> 
>>> Carter
>>> 
>>>> On Oct 7, 2013, at 12:39 PM, Kaustubh Gadkari <kaustubh at cs.colostate.edu> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Hey Carter,
>>>> 
>>>> I just wanted to check if you've found any reasons why ranonymize is taking so long to complete on my dataset?
>>>> 
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> Kaustubh
>>>> 
>>>>> On Sep 10, 2013, at 10:40 AM, Kaustubh Gadkari <kaustubh at CS.ColoState.EDU> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Sep 10, 2013, at 9:33 AM, Carter Bullard <carter at qosient.com> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Well,
>>>>>> On my system 80% of the cycles are being spent doing the address,
>>>>>> port, mac, AS number mappings (managing allocation of a new object
>>>>>> and caching the values), and a small amount on the lookups.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I'll work on profiling the mapping logic to see if we've got
>>>>>> something askew.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Great. Thanks again for the help.
>>>>> 
>>>>>> Hope all is most excellent,
>>>>> 
>>>>> And with you too :)
>>>>> 
>>>>> Kaustubh
>>>>> 
>>>>>> Carter
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> On Sep 10, 2013, at 12:22 PM, Kaustubh Gadkari <kaustubh at CS.ColoState.EDU> wrote:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> On Sep 10, 2013, at 8:40 AM, Carter Bullard <carter at qosient.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Hey Kaustubh,
>>>>>>>> I've been profiling ranonymize() with a lot of data, and
>>>>>>>> while I do see opportunities to improve performance, I don't
>>>>>>>> see many massively inefficient parts of the code, when run
>>>>>>>> against my data sets.  There are still some things for
>>>>>>>> me to look at, so I wanted you to know that I'm working on
>>>>>>>> your problem.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Thanks for looking at this, Carter. 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Based on what you've seen me so far, you're machine is 85%
>>>>>>>> idle, is ranonymize() using 100% of a single core, or is it
>>>>>>>> sleeping a lot?
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> top says ranonymize is using 100% of a single core.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> What kind of machine are you running on??  Can you describe the
>>>>>>>> machine a bit?  CPUs, memory, disks, etc….
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> I've been testing this on two machines. One is a Dell PowerEdge 2970, with 2 quad core AMD Opteron processors. The machine has 32GB RAM, a 130GB system disk and 16 8TB RAID5 partitions. The other machine is a Dell PowerEdge 2950. It has 2 quad core Intel Xeon X5450 CPUs, with 32GB RAM, a 140GB system disk and 3 8TB RAID5 partitions.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>>> Kaustubh
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Carter
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> On Sep 3, 2013, at 3:05 PM, Kaustubh Gadkari <kaustubh at cs.colostate.edu> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 12:33 PM, Carter Bullard <carter at qosient.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> Hmmmmmm, well, you're not using the machine much (85% idle)
>>>>>>>>>> so I'm looking into whether we're making any calls to any
>>>>>>>>>> routines that would add some wait states, like name lookups, or
>>>>>>>>>> sleeping somewhere.
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> Lets assume that there is a big problem, and I'll try to make
>>>>>>>>>> some changes to improve your performance.
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> Thanks, Carter.
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> Kaustubh
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> Carter
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>> On Sep 3, 2013, at 1:57 PM, Kaustubh Gadkari <kaustubh at cs.colostate.edu> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>> Hey Carter,
>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>> On Sep 3, 2013, at 11:36 AM, Carter Bullard <carter at qosient.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>> Hey Kaustubh,
>>>>>>>>>>>> If its still writing records to the output file, its not in an infinite loop,
>>>>>>>>>>>> although I'm sure that it feels like one.  So, no need to print debug msgs
>>>>>>>>>>>> or run under gdb().
>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>> Hmmmmmm, you must have a very large number of IP addresses.  racount() isn't doing
>>>>>>>>>>>> anything exotic with the "-M addr" mode.  Its hashing and storing each unique
>>>>>>>>>>>> IP address, so that we can report on how many and what types.
>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>> My guess is that you must be short on physical memory, and the programs are swapping,
>>>>>>>>>>>> which means that everything on this machine will be going very slowly.
>>>>>>>>>>>> Run " top " to see if one of our programs is eating all the memory, or
>>>>>>>>>>>> use vmstat() or vm_stat() or whatever to see if there is any paging.
>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>> No, the machine is not running out of memory. ranonymize is the largest memory user, and it is using 42.1% of a total of 32GB RAM. The swap usage is only 205MB, which is OK.  vmstat shows me the following:
>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>> kaustubh at proton:~$ sudo vmstat -w
>>>>>>>>>>> procs -------------------memory------------------ ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- -----cpu-------
>>>>>>>>>>> r  b       swpd       free       buff      cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs  us sy  id wa st
>>>>>>>>>>> 1  0     205916    1638176     101636   16287400    0    0   527   342    1    1  14  0  85  1  0
>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>> There are no other memory intensive processes running on the box.
>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>> If it is a memory problem, then you will need to subdivide the data based
>>>>>>>>>>>> on size, not on time, using rasplit().  And yes its easy to merge split files
>>>>>>>>>>>> back to a single file.
>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>> UNFORTUNATELY, because the scope of anonymization is the file, anonymizing a
>>>>>>>>>>>> single big file of records will generate different results compared to
>>>>>>>>>>>> anonymizing a set of split files created from the big file.  Address A will be
>>>>>>>>>>>> anonymized potentially to a different address in each file.
>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>> The configuration provides the means to get consistent results between files,
>>>>>>>>>>>> but its a bit of work to do so.
>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>> Do you think you're running out of memory?
>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>> No, I think I'm ok in terms of memory usage.
>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>> Kaustubh
>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>> Carter
>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>> On Sep 3, 2013, at 1:11 PM, Kaustubh Gadkari <kaustubh.gadkari at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 8:49 AM, Carter Bullard <carter at qosient.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Hmmm, if racount() takes 18min, I would think ranonymize() should take about 20min
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> to complete.   You can run " racount -M addr " to get racount() to printout address
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> information, like how many addresses are in the file.
>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>> Carter, I ran racount with -M addr, but the process hasn't finished
>>>>>>>>>>>>> yet (it's been running for about 90 min now). I'll let it run for a
>>>>>>>>>>>>> while longer and keep you updated.
>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ranonymize() works on a single argus record at a time, reading a single record,
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> anonymizing all the various data elements, and then writing the anonymized
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> record out to the output file.  If ranonymize() hasn't written out a record recently,
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> then its possible that its in an infinite loop, especially if its running at 100%, and
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> its been running for a month, and it seems to have stopped writing into the file.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> What was the last " modified " time on your output file ???
>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>> It hasn't stopped writing to file .. the last modified time is right
>>>>>>>>>>>>> now, since the process is still running.
>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> If you've compiled debug support into your ra* programs, you can send a USR1
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> signal to the running ranonymize() and it will start writing debug information out
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> to stderr().  Send a USR2 to turn debug output off.  Assuming that ranonymize()s
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> process id is 35122, you can do this:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> % kill -USR1 35122
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> % kill -USR2 35122
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> If you've compiled development support into your programs, you can attach
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> to ranonymize() using gdb(), and then step through the program to see where
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> it is.
>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>> I haven't compiled my ra* programs with debug or development support.
>>>>>>>>>>>>> If you can tell me what I need to change in the Makefiles, I can do so
>>>>>>>>>>>>> and run ranonymize with gdb and see what's happening.
>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>> Kaustubh
>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> % gdb ranonymize 35122
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> This will attach to the program, and stop the acitve process.  If this all seems
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> unfamiliar, send more email, and I'll walk you through one of these strategies.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Carter
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> On Sep 3, 2013, at 9:56 AM, Kaustubh Gadkari <kaustubh.gadkari at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 7:19 AM, Kaustubh Gadkari
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> <kaustubh.gadkari at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 6:00 AM, Carter Bullard <carter at qosient.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Hmmmm,
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> There shouldn't be any performance issues with anonymizing a file, if your
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> just
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> anonymizing the IP addresses.  How many addresses are in the file?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> What does your ranonymize.conf file look like?   How much memory is it
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> using?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> I am not quite sure how many IP addresses there are in the file. My
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ranonymize.conf looks like this:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> RANON_PRESERVE_ETHERNET_VENDOR=yes
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> RANON_PRESERVE_BROADCAST_ADDRESS=yes
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> RANON_NET_ANONYMIZATION=sequential
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> RANON_HOST_ANONYMIZATION=sequential
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> RANON_PRESERVE_NET_ADDRESS_HIERARCHY=class
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> I took a look at how much memory ranonymize is using .. the usage is
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> about 42% on a machine with 32GB RAM.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ranonymize() can be a little complex O(nLogN + C), but it should be
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> in the same time frame as racount().  How long does it take for racount()
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> to read the file?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> I am running racount right now .. I will post results once it finishes.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> racount takes about 18min to run on the file:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> real    17m58.528s
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> user    17m12.413s
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> sys     2m0.332s
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Kaustubh
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Just a rule of thumb. If a ra* program doesn't complete in a few minutes,
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> you
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> should stop it and try to figure out if there is a memory problem or not.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Thanks, I'll keep this in mind :)
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Kaustubh
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Carter
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> On Sep 2, 2013, at 2:20 PM, Kaustubh Gadkari <kaustubh.gadkari at gmail.com>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> I have a set of argus flow data captured at our data capture vantage point,
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> and I want to anonymize the IP addresses (both source and destination) fully
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> i.e. I want to replace both the addresses, using a prefix preserving
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> technique. I have tried using ranonymize, but it is taking an extremely long
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> time to anonymize the file (I started the process a couple of months ago, on
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> a ~125GB file, and the output file size today is only ~30GB).
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Can anyone suggest the right way to go about anonymizing the data set I
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> have? Is ranonymize the right tool for the job?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Kaustubh
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Kaustubh Gadkari
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Kaustubh Gadkari
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Kaustubh Gadkari
>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>>>>>>>> Kaustubh Gadkari
>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>>>>>> Kaustubh Gadkari
>>>>>>>>>>> kaustubh at cs.colostate.edu
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> -- 
>>>>>>>>> Kaustubh Gadkari
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>> Kaustubh Gadkari
>>>>>>> kaustubh at cs.colostate.edu
>>>>> 
>>>>> --
>>>>> Kaustubh Gadkari
>>>>> kaustubh at cs.colostate.edu
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> Kaustubh Gadkari
>>>> kaustubh at cs.colostate.edu
>>>> 
>>> 
>> 
> 
> --
> Kaustubh Gadkari
> kaustubh at cs.colostate.edu
> 

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