Minimum Requirements

SELKS does not take much to get going. StamusNetworks suggest that 2 cores and 9GB of memory is all that is needed to get started.

What I have deployed

I am using a old dell optiplex 9020. If you haven’t checked out my lab intro blog, please look it over and I explain more on what to expect when finding one of these systems.

I did beef my 9020 up a bit with 32 gb of ram(max RAM motherboard will take), intel i7 and 2tb of HDD for log space. I run the OS on a 500gb SD. I also added two NICs, which will be needed or you can get by with just using motherboard Ethernet and a usb Ethernet adapter.

A bit overkill I know, but none the less this system will run SELKS just fine.

Installing SELKS

SELKS can be built from the ground up on Linux, I did this when I first started learning Linux. I figured if I attempted to install each component separately I could develop my Linux skills at the same time.

Boy did I learn the hard way about software version compatibility with the many many different versions of Linux Distros. I probably spent hours and hours and days on researching, installing, and repeating the process until I managed to successfully get my first alert.

I also learned that documentation is very important, I didn’t document anything , not one minute of my failures or successes was documented. Please if you take any advise , document everything , every failure and every success because you never know when you might need to revisit your projects.

After being unsuccessful and successfully installing SELKS components a few times, I decided to install SELKS using the StamusNetwork ISO.

This was a lot less painful and a lot less time consuming. I was generating alerts in no time and creating custom rules.

SELKS ISO

You can download the latest SELKS ISO here.

For this walkthrough we will be using the “complete image with desktop” version.

Once we got the ISO file, we will need to create a bootable USB.