Tuesday 18 February 2020

[Solved] Snort: ERROR: Can't initialize DAQ pfring (-1) -

I came across this error after performing a regular system update on CentOS 7. Although it's a rather generic looking error message it turned out to be quite a trivial problem.

The pfring driver (provided by daq_pfring) had been compiled against the latest kernel version - however for whatever reason an older kernel was being loaded by default by the bootloader.

This can be evidenced by running:

uname -r

and a rpm -qa | grep kernel

To correct this issue:

grub2-set-default 0 # presuming menu item 0 is the kernel you want listed in: /boot/efi/EFI/centos/grub.cfg (which is usually the case.)

and then confirm with:

grub2-editenv list

Restart the machine and then check the kernel / test snort again:

shutdown -r now

sudo service snort status