Owl Monitoring System Sensor Installation Manual

Setting Up Sensors for the Owl Monitoring System

An Owl sensor is configured to send DNS queries to a set of DNS nameservers. The queries may be for a variety of DNS resource record types, and they are sent to a specific nameserver to request data about a specific target host. For example, one query might request that the D root nameserver return NS records for the "www.example.com" host, while another query might request that a local (non-root) nameserver return AAAA records for the "mail.example.com" host. Data will be collected for each configured query and given to the Owl manager to whom the sensor reports. The different sensors in the sensor set may perform different queries or the same queries.

A configuration file controls the behavior of the Owl sensor. This file defines the queries that the sensor will perform, the Owl manager (or managers) to whom the sensor reports, locations of data and log files, frequency of queries, and other important behaviors.

An Owl sensor may provide its data to more than one Owl manager. In such situations, the managers operate independently of each other and do not know of each other's existence. Throughout the installation manuals, it will be assumed that an installation will have a single manager. Special instructions for multiple-manager environments will be given where needed.

This document provides an operational overview of the Owl system, installation instructions for the Owl sensor and the third-party software that supports it. Instructions for configuring the Owl sensor are also given.

Organization of Installation Manual

Sections:

	0.		Setting Up Sensors for the Owl Monitoring System
	1.		Operational Overview of the Owl Monitoring System
	2.		Owl Sensor Installation
	3.		An Interlude on Sensor Queries
	4.		Adding Owl Sensors to an Existing Owl Installation
	5.		Adding New Queries to Existing Owl Sensors
	6.		Owl Sensor Commands

Full Table of Contents

Sponsors:

This work was implemented by the following companies and organizations:

Parsons

This work is funded in part by the following organizations:

U.S. Department of Homeland Security/Science & Technology (S&T)

The Owl logo is copyright © 2012 by Wayne Morrison (Wayne@WayneMorrison.com). All Rights Reserved.
This logo is used for the Owl Monitoring System by the DNSSEC-Tools Project (dnssec-tools.org) by permission.