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Next: 4.2 Snort says ``Rule Up: 4 Rules and Alerts Previous: 4 Rules and Alerts

4.1 Errors loading rules files

Some common ones: 

  • ERROR telnet.rules:YYY => Port value missing in rule!

  • ERROR telnet.rules:YYY => Bad port number: "(msg:"blah"

  • ERROR telnet.rules:YYY => Couldn't resolve hostname blah

What's going on?

``telnet.rules'' is the file where the syntax error occurred, and ``YYY'' is the line number it occurred on. There are a couple of possibilities:

  1. The rule is missing a port value, has an invalid port number, or a bad hostname - in which case the ruleset author/maintainer should be notified.

  2. More often, the rule is just fine, but a variable in it was not declared. Open the rules file, look at the rule on the line number provided, and confirm that the variables it uses have been declared. You can read more about variables at http://www.snort.org/docs/writing_rules/chap2.html#tth_sEc2.1.2


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