Installing Snort on Mac OS X

Problem

You want to install Snort on a Mac OS X machine.

Solution

You can install from source as detailed in "Installing Snort from Source on Unix." For a binary installer, use HenWen, a Snort GUI for Mac OS X that comes with a precompiled Snort binary.

To install HenWen, download the disk image from http://seiru.home.comcast.net/henwen.html. Mount the disk image, and copy the files to your hard disk.

Discussion

You can either install from source through a terminal in the same way as in Recipe 1.1 (making use of sudo instead of actually becoming root), or you can install using HenWen.

HenWen (available from http://seiryu.home.comcast.net/henwen.html) is a GUI for Snort that includes a fully precompiled version of Snort, optimized to run on Mac OS X.

Installation of HenWen couldn't be simpler. The download is a gzipped disk-image, so as soon as the download is complete, it automatically decompresses and mounts the disk image (see Figure 1-10).

Figure 1-10. HenWen installation

The remainder of the installation entails copying HenWen and LetterStick to a place on your hard disk. Use and configuration of HenWen is covered in depth in Chapter 5.

See Also

Recipe 1.2

HenWen documentation (http://seiryu.home.comcast.net/henwen.html)