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A powerful, easily deployable network traffic analysis tool suite for network security monitoring

Quick Start

Documentation

Components

Supported Protocols

Configuring

Arkime

Dashboards

Hedgehog Linux

Contribution Guide

Development

Checking out the Malcolm source code results in the following subdirectories in your malcolm/ working copy:

and the following files of special note:

Building from source

Building the Malcolm images from scratch requires Internet access to pull source files for its components. Once Internet access is available, execute the following command to build all the images used by the Malcolm appliance:

$ ./scripts/build.sh

Then, go take a walk or something since it will be a while. When you are done, you can run docker images and see if you have fresh images for:

Alternately, if you have forked Malcolm on GitHub, workflow files are provided that contain instructions for GitHub to build the images, as well as sensor and Malcolm installer ISOs. The resulting images are named according to the pattern ghcr.io/owner/malcolm/image:branch (e.g., if you have forked Malcolm with the GitHub user romeogdetlevjr, the Arkime container built for the main branch would be named ghcr.io/romeogdetlevjr/malcolm/arkime:main). To run your local instance of Malcolm using these images instead of the official ones, you will need to edit your docker-compose.yml file(s) and replace the image: tags according to this new pattern, or use the bash helper script ./shared/bin/github_image_helper.sh to pull and re-tag the images.

Pre-Packaged installation files

Creating pre-packaged installation files

scripts/malcolm_appliance_packager.sh can be run to package up the configuration files (and, if necessary, the images), which can be copied to a network share or USB drive for distribution to non-networked machines. For example:

$ ./scripts/malcolm_appliance_packager.sh 
You must set a username and password for Malcolm, and self-signed X.509 certificates will be generated

Package Kubernetes manifests in addition to docker-compose.yml [y/N]?

Packaged Malcolm to "/home/user/tmp/malcolm_20250310_134542_2425d08b.tar.gz"

Do you need to package container images also [y/N]? n

To install Malcolm:
  1. Run install.py
  2. Follow the prompts

To start, stop, restart, etc. Malcolm:
  Use the control scripts in the "scripts/" directory:
   - start       (start Malcolm)
   - stop        (stop Malcolm)
   - restart     (restart Malcolm)
   - logs        (monitor Malcolm logs)
   - wipe        (stop Malcolm and clear its database)
   - auth_setup  (change authentication-related settings)

Malcolm services can be accessed at https://<IP or hostname>/

Do you need to package container images also [y/N]? y

Packaged Malcolm images to "/home/user/tmp/malcolm_20250310_134542_2425d08b_images.tar.xz"

To install Malcolm:
  1. Run install.py
  2. Follow the prompts

To start, stop, restart, etc. Malcolm:
  Use the control scripts in the "scripts/" directory:
   - start       (start Malcolm)
   - stop        (stop Malcolm)
   - restart     (restart Malcolm)
   - logs        (monitor Malcolm logs)
   - wipe        (stop Malcolm and clear its database)
   - auth_setup  (change authentication-related settings)

Malcolm services can be accessed at https://<IP or hostname>/

The above example will result in the following artifacts for distribution as explained in the script’s output:

$ ls -lh
total 2.0G
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user  61k May 13 11:32 install.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 2.0G May 13 11:37 malcolm_20190513_101117_f0d052c_images.tar.xz
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user  683 May 13 11:37 malcolm_20190513_101117_f0d052c.README.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 183k May 13 11:32 malcolm_20190513_101117_f0d052c.tar.gz

Installing from pre-packaged installation files

If you have obtained pre-packaged installation files to install Malcolm on a non-networked machine via an internal network share or on a USB key, you likely have the following files:

Run install.py malcolm_XXXXXXXX_XXXXXX_XXXXXXX.tar.gz and follow the prompts. If you do not already have Docker and Docker Compose installed, the install.py script will help you install them.