Disk Manager
Snare Central includes a Disk Manager utility that allows the administrator to easily increase storage capacity for event data allocation by adding extra hard drives to an existing system, or by allowing the server to connect to an existing NAS device.
Disk Manager also allows the administrator to have transparent access to data backups in CD, DVD or USB media created with the Snare Central Data Backup utility directly, without needing to restore data to the local hard drive.
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IMPORTANT: Please note that in order for Disk Manager to be able to access iSCSI disks (typically used in Snare central cloud based installations), it is necessary to first configure the internal Snare firewall to open the default TCP port 3260 |
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IMPORTANT: The disk manager functions described in this section will only work with systems that have a base install of 400GB disk or larger as this created additional disk partitions that can be resized. If systems are installed using the minimum sizing as detailed in the installation guide then Disk Manager can not resize the disks as it would require unmounting the root file system which is not possible within the application. For sizing options, please refer to the Installation Guide for Snare Central > Minimum Requirements. |
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Snare Central disk layout
Snare Central complies with the “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG)” recommendation from the US DoD, and uses the Linux logical volume manager (LVM) to provide the following file system structure by default:
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If additional physical disk resources are assigned to the Snare Server, the Disk Manager objective will provide the ability to assign some or all of the available disk, to the partitions marked as compatible with resizing ("Yes") in the table above.
Interface
The Disk Manager user interface shows existing file systems represented as cylinders. It highlights the current space allocated and used. In the above example, the root file system is shown in black and is currently at 53% of capacity.
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Selecting, or hovering the mouse over a particularly cylinder, displays the filesystem status and disk summary information.
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Mounting a CD, DVD or USB
The following image shows the DVD dialog. This dialog provides the capability to mount and/or unmount a data backup device. Once the device has been made available, the data on the device is merged with the default Snare data archive, making it available to query through the Snare Server user interface.
Ticking the 'mount at startup' checkbox will modify the system filesystem configuration to make the change persistent after a reboot.
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Mounting a NAS
The NAS dialogue allows the user to mount or unmount a Network Attached Storage.
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- A name to identify this device (e.g NAS1 or central_storage).
- NAS IP address or name (FQDN) and port number to use.
- The type of NAS to attach to (CIFS or NFS)
- The share name inside the NAS as a path (or directory name in case of NFS).
- User name and Password.
- Workgroup if required (CIFS only).
- If access to this device after reboot is needed or not (this checkbox actually updates /etc/fstab system file so becomes persistent).
Resizing a local file system
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IMPORTANT. Before changing the sizes on any file system, unmount any NAS, DVD, CD or USB device from the server as it may interfere with the resizing process and lead to unpredictable results. DO NOT JUST INCREASE THE SIZE OF AN EXISTING DISK WHEN USING VIRTUAL BASED SYSTEMS, ADD A NEW DISK OF THE EXTRA SIZE CAPACITY YOU NEED TO THE SYSTEM. Due to the way the disks are managed and allocated there is no support for extending the size of a disk, it has to be a new disk for the Snare Disk Manager to manage the disk and slice up the space for partitions to use. If you want to use a new contiguous larger disk for storing the data then you will need to build a FULL new Snare Central and then do a side by side migration if you want to keep the existing data to use this newer larger disk space. Or you can rebuild the existing system if you are ok to wipe all the data in the existing system. |
Each of the local file systems on the server is represented by a cylinder in the Disk Manager user interface. Another cylinder represents the amount of “Free Space” available on the server.
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When resizing any file system all Snare back processes need to be stopped and depending on the size of the file system this could take several minutes. |
Adding a new hard disk to Snare archive
If no more disk space is available, the administrator can add another physical disk (or disks) to the server. After a system reboot, the new drive will be available as free space in the Disk Manager ready to be assigned to existing files systems as described.
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