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A powerful, easily deployable network traffic analysis tool suite

Quick Start

Documentation

Components

Supported Protocols

Configuring

Arkime

Dashboards

Hedgehog Linux

Contribution Guide

Quick start

Getting Malcolm

For a TL;DR example of downloading, configuring, and running Malcolm in Docker on a Linux platform, see Installation example using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

For a more in-depth guide convering installing both Malcolm and a Hedgehog Linux sensor using the Malcolm installer ISO and Hedgehog Linux installer ISO, see End-to-end Malcolm and Hedgehog Linux ISO Installation.

Source code

The files required to build and run Malcolm are available on its GitHub page. Malcolm’s source-code is released under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0 (see LICENSE.txt and NOTICE.txt for the terms of its release).

Building Malcolm from scratch

The build.sh script can build Malcolm’s Docker images from scratch. See Building from source for more information.

Initial configuration

The scripts to control Malcolm require Python 3. The install.py script requires the dotenv, requests and PyYAML modules for Python 3, and will make use of the pythondialog module for user interaction (on Linux) if it is available.

You must run auth_setup prior to pulling Malcolm’s Docker images. You should also ensure your system configuration and Malcolm settings are tuned by running ./scripts/install.py and ./scripts/configure (see Malcolm Configuration).

Pull Malcolm’s Docker images

Malcolm’s Docker images are periodically built and hosted on GitHub. If you already have Docker and Docker Compose, these prebuilt images can be pulled by navigating into the Malcolm directory (containing the docker-compose.yml file) and running docker compose --profile malcolm pull like this:

$ docker compose --profile malcolm pull
Pulling api               ... done
Pulling arkime            ... done
Pulling dashboards        ... done
Pulling dashboards-helper ... done
Pulling file-monitor      ... done
Pulling filebeat          ... done
Pulling freq              ... done
Pulling htadmin           ... done
Pulling logstash          ... done
Pulling netbox            ... done
Pulling netbox-postgresql ... done
Pulling netbox-redis      ... done
Pulling nginx-proxy       ... done
Pulling opensearch        ... done
Pulling pcap-capture      ... done
Pulling pcap-monitor      ... done
Pulling suricata          ... done
Pulling upload            ... done
Pulling zeek              ... done

You can then observe the images have been retrieved by running docker images:

$ docker images
REPOSITORY                                                     TAG               IMAGE ID       CREATED      SIZE
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/api                                   23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   158MB
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/arkime                                23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   816MB
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/dashboards                            23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   1.02GB
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/dashboards-helper                     23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   184MB
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/file-monitor                          23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   588MB
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/file-upload                           23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   259MB
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/filebeat-oss                          23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   624MB
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/freq                                  23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   132MB
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/htadmin                               23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   242MB
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/logstash-oss                          23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   1.35GB
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/netbox                                23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   1.01GB
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/nginx-proxy                           23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   121MB
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/opensearch                            23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   1.17GB
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/pcap-capture                          23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   121MB
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/pcap-monitor                          23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   213MB
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/postgresql                            23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   268MB
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/redis                                 23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   34.2MB
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/suricata                              23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   278MB
ghcr.io/idaholab/malcolm/zeek                                  23.12.0           xxxxxxxxxxxx   3 days ago   1GB

Import from pre-packaged tarballs

Once built, the malcolm_appliance_packager.sh script can be used to create pre-packaged Malcolm tarballs for import on another machine. See Pre-Packaged Installation Files for more information.

Starting and stopping Malcolm

Use the scripts in the scripts/ directory to start and stop Malcolm, view debug logs of a currently running instance, wipe the database and restore Malcolm to a fresh state, etc.

User interface

A few minutes after starting Malcolm (probably 5 or so for Logstash to be completely loaded, depending on the system), the following services will be accessible: