HP-UX Host Intrusion Detection System Version 4.3 administrator guide

Alert date/time sort seems inconsistent
□ Two factors come into play in this seeming inconsistency: First, the agent’s date/time stamp
is based on the local host time when the alert was received. Second, the time the System
Manager uses to sort the alert is based on the UTC when the alert actually occurred. Under
normal circumstances, these two times are identical. On occasion, however, there may be a
difference depending on internal processing time, which may make the alert list inconsistent.
Alerts are not being displayed in the alert browser
□ Check to see if they are appearing in /var/opt/ids/alert.log.
□ Check for errors in the error browser.
□ Determine whether IDDS failed at boot-up: Use the /etc/dmesg command to verify that
there are no messages saying, IDDS disabled.
□ Verify that the host name and IP address are configured and valid.
□ In the event that the keys have become corrupted, regenerate all key sets using procedures
from “Setting Up HP-UX HIDS Secure Communications” (page 29).
□ Verify that the agent system is set to “Running” (with a green background) in the System
Manager.
□ Determine whether any changes have been made to the detection templates, which may
filter out the alerts (such as ignoring whole directories or users).
□ If no login/logout alerts are seen, /var/adm/wtmp might be corrupted. To check, run the
last command and see if it prints an error or segmentation faults. If so, you need to do the
following as root:
# rm /var/adm/wtmp
# touch /var/adm/wtmp
# chown adm:adm /var/adm/wtmp;
# chmod 644 /var/tmp/wtmp
On HP–UX 11i v2 operating systems, if removing wtmp still produces an error when running
the last command, also remove /var/adm/wtmps (it is automatically recreated).
□ Is the communication to the agent timing out?. Check the agent’s /var/opt/ids/
error.log for timeout messages. If timeout messages appear, try increasing the timeout
values in the agent’s /etc/opt/ids/ids.cf configuration file; see “Remote
Communication Configuration” (page 195).
□ If /var/opt/ids/error.log contains out-of-memory errors, the maximum data segment
size may need to be increased or more swap space might need to be added. Run kmtune
-l -q maxdsiz (kctune on HP-UX 11i v2 and HP-UX 11i v3) and /usr/sbin/swapinfo
to determine your current tunable setting and swap usage, respectively.
Buffer overflow triggers false positives
□ Because Buffer Overflow uses a heuristic, it may trigger false positives. If it does, please
document what actions were performed that generated the alert, and contact HP support
so we can improve the heuristic.
For more information on buffer overflow, see “Some Template Configuration Guidelines”
(page 69).
Duplicate alerts appear in System Manager
If you see duplicate alerts, you might have multiple instances of the same template configured
in your schedule within different surveillance groups with overlapping time tables.
Getting several aggregated alerts for the same process
Problem: Alerts generated by a process running a program specified in an alert aggregation tuple
are being aggregated into several aggregated alerts.
218 Troubleshooting