Managing ModSecurity Alerts: More Console Tuning

In a previous Blog entry, I outlined a number of steps that you could take to increase performance of the ModSecurity open source Console. While these tuning steps will certainly help to increase performance, there is still one big issue that will bring the open source Console to its knees - too many open/active alerts in the Alert Management interface (where the URL is - http://ip_of_your_console:8886/viewAlerts). Having too many open alerts will chew up the available memory for the MUI and it will become unresponsive.

If you are in the scenario where you already have too many active alerts and the MUI is totally non-responsive, you may have to try and bypass the MUI and instead use the Java Derby DB client to interact directly with the DB listener and close the active alerts.

Removing Too Many Existing Alerts from the MUI

Here are the steps:

1. Stop the currently running console with -
   

   # ./modsecurity-console stop

   You should then check the "ps" output to ensure that the Java process is not hanging. If it is, you may need to either re-execute that command or issue a kill command to that specific process number.

2. Enable remote access to the database by editing console.conf and changing the startNetworkServer setting to "true". You will need to use the same username/password when connecting later with the Derby client.

   <Service derby com.thinkingstone.juggler.components.DerbyServer>
       Property password "XXXXX"
       Property startNetworkServer "true"
       Property host "0.0.0.0"
       Property username "XXXXX"
       Property port "1527"
   </Service>

3. Restart the console with -
   

   # ./modsecurity-console start

4. Verify that the DB listener is up and running on port 1527 with -
   

   # netstat -nlp | grep 1527

5. CD into the modsecurity-console/lib/ directory and then start the
   java commandline utility like this -
   

   java -classpath derbyclient.jar:derbytools.jar -Dij.driver='org.apache.derby.jdbc.ClientDriver' org.apache.derby.tools.ij

6. Connect to the Derby DB like this (make sure to substitute your Host:port and username/password info) -
   

   connect 'jdbc:derby://HOST:PORT/consoleDb;username=USER;password=PASS';

7. To close all open active alerts -
   

   UPDATE alerts SET alert_status = 'CLOSED' WHERE alert_status = 'OPEN';

8. Then restart the modsecurity-console -
   

   # ./modsecurity-console start

9. Attempt to access the MUI

Is There A Better Way To Manage Alerts?

If you are becoming frustrated with the performance of the open source Console and/or if you have more then 3 ModSecurity sensors to manage, you may want to consider taking a look at Breach's commercial ModSecurity Management Appliance that was just recently made available. It has many significant performance increases and is an enterprise class solution (it can manage up to 50 ModSecurity Sensors).