I need some help with my Snort/Barnyard2 setup. My goal is to have Snort send unified2 logs to Barnyard2 and then have Barnyard2 send the data to other locations. Here is my currrent setup.

OS

• Scientific Linux 6

Snort Version

• 2.9.2.3

Barnyard2 Version

• 2.1.9

Snort command

snort -c /etc/snort/snort.conf -i eth2 &

Barnyard2 command

/usr/local/bin/barnyard2 -c /etc/snort/barnyard2.conf -d /var/log/snort -f snort.log -w /var/log/snort/barnyard.waldo &

snort.conf

output unified2: filename snort.log, limit 128

barnyard2.conf

output alert_syslog: host=127.0.0.1
output database: log, mysql, user=snort dbname=snort password=password host=localhost

With this setup, barnyard2 is showing all of the correct information in the database and I'm using BASE to view it on the web GUI. I was hoping to be able to send the full packet data to syslog with barnyard2 but after reading around, it seems that it is impossible to do that. So I then started trying to modify the snort.conf file and add lines like "output alert_full: alert.full". This definitely gave me a lot more information but still not the full packet data like I want.

So my question is, is there anyway I can use barnyard2 to send the full packet data of alerts to a human readable file? Since I can't send it directly to syslog, I can create another process to take the data from that file and ship it off to another server. If not, what flags and/or snort.conf configuration would you recommend to get the most data possible but still be able to handle quite a bit of traffic? In the end of it all, these alerts will be shipped to a central server via a SSH tunnel. I'm trying to stay away from databases.