Install Prepare a System

1. Before Bootstrapping

Table of Contents hardware requirements supported Linux distributions prepare a server install Perl, if not installed. configure an MTA (mail transfer agent) configure a Domain Name

hardware requirements

It is difficult to provide hard requirements regarding CPU, internal memory and disk space needed to run Taranis. We recommend a minimal configuration with around 10 GB of disk space, 1 processor with 4 cores, and 4 GB of internal RAM.

A typical minimal configuration is identified by the parameters:

• Sources: Around 250 to 500 sources
• Items: Around 1.000 items collected daily from the 250 – 500 sources
• Users: 1 to 3 concurrent users
• Threads: The collector runs with a maximum of 2 threads
• Clustering: Clustering is enabled for around a maximum of 50% of all your sources (125-250 sources)
• Screenshots: Incidentally used

Changing the parameters will change the hardware requirements. So if you e.g. start using the screenshot functionality this requires more CPU-power and more database storage (typically 1 to 3 MB/screenshot). If you decide to use more threads for the Collector this requires an according number of extra cores.

To ensure you have a robust setup, we recommend that your system/configuration is scalable. Make sure you can add more disk space or internal memory to your system if needed. Also make sure that it is possible to change your configuration so that e.g. the collector no longer runs on the same server as the other Taranis components. This way you make sure that both your current Taranis configuration as well as future Taranis configurations can be handled by your infrastructure.

supported Linux distributions

Taranis installation is only supported for the latest versions of CentOS (currently version 7 with or without SELinux), Ubuntu (currently 16.04LTS), and RedHat (7EL). We also run Taranis on RedHat 6EL and OpenSUSE 42.3/Tumbleweed, but those are not supported. It may work for you.

NCSC will try to help you with Taranis on request, but without guarantee on success or response time (Best effort).

prepare a server

Install a server or VM with one of the supported operating systems. Configure a hostname.

NOTE: It is not easy to install Taranis in Docker, because we run multiple daemons. Although there are some tricks to get it work, of course.

install Perl, if not installed.

For CentOS, run “yum install perl”. On Ubuntu, run “apt-get install perl-modules”

Upgrade Perl’s CPAN.pm to at least 1.94_63 (released in 2011) with

perl -MCPAN -e 'install CPAN'

configure an MTA (mail transfer agent)

The best results are with local delivery of email. Probably you want to configure postfix. Look careful at the headers of sent messages, to see that it does not expose too much details about your infrastructure.

configure a Domain Name

You will need a name for the web-interface of Taranis. Please configure this before starting the installation.