Conky for SELKS

by Peter Manev | Dec 07, 2014 | SELKS, Open Source, Suricata, Stamus Labs

Conky is a cool, desktop and lightweight monitoring tool. SELKS comes with a ready to use Conky config (also as part of the selks-scripts-stamus package).

With the installation of Conky - you get the possibility to do system monitoring on your desktop. Out of the box there are no Conky config files that are very useful for SELKS. That is why we created one. The trick is we used some info that Conky is capable of reading in itself for the system in general , however we added some stats that we harvest from the Suricata unix socket on the SELKS distro. That way you get right away runtime, capture method , running mode and Suricata version right on your desktop - among other system stats like - Memory/CPU/Network usage.

The Conky config itself is already installed in /etc/conky/conky.conf however it is also present at /opt/selks/Scripts/Configs/Conky as part of the selks-scripts-stamus package for the purpose of record keeping(back up).

So if you are using the Desktop edition of SELKS, you can use Conky easily by running:

conky -d

in a terminal. Then you can close the terminal if you wish. That's all :)

The SELKS Conky config is best utilized when used with a screen resolution of 1680 x 1050 or more.

You can get further ideas for conky configs - just google "conky templates" there is plenty of stuff out there.

Peter Manev

Peter Manev is the co-founder and chief strategy officer (CSO) at Stamus Networks. He is a member of the executive team at Open Network Security Foundation (OISF). Peter has over 15 years of experience in the IT industry, including enterprise-level IT security practice. He is a passionate user, developer, and explorer of innovative open-source security software, and he is responsible for training as well as quality assurance and testing on the development team of Suricata – the open-source threat detection engine. Peter is a regular speaker and educator on open-source security, threat hunting, and network security at conferences and live-fire cyber exercises, such as Crossed Swords, DeepSec, Troopers, DefCon, RSA, Suricon, SharkFest, and others. Peter resides in Gothenburg, Sweden.

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