Anonymization of argus flow data

[Kaustubh Gadkari]

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

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