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Up the Wazuh: A SIEM-ple Adventure in Troubleshooting

Initial setup

To start  I downloaded the .osa file from the  wazuh website (https://wazuh.com) and then installed it in my virtualbox hypervisor.

Then I booted up my fedora linux VM and the wazuh VM with the dashboard and manager on.

 After I had logged in to the wazuh VM with the default credentials I used the ip a command to find out the ip address of the wazuh VM. As from reading the documentation I’d need this later.

In my fedora VM I opened a terminal and used the commands on the wazuh website to install the agent on the VM. After some time the installation was completed and I had to update the. conf file with the IP address of the wazuh manager.

This is important because  the file is a generic file that needs to be modified to make it specific to each individual setup.

 All was going well up to this point. I tried to get the fedora VM to talk to the wazuh VM.

The problems I encountered

It was here the problems started when I tried to ping the wazuh VM from the fedora VM and it failed.

 I used ping to prove there was a connection between the two machines.

 The Web based dashboard that I was trying to open in my linux mint VM was displaying a page not found.

 After nearly an hour of reading the wazuh documentation and using Google and co-pilot I found that I needed to open the ports 443 and 1514 on the firewall.

I found it interesting that each of the Linux distro’s I was using had a different firewall and needed different commands to open ports and check the status of the firewall.

This is important because port 443 is for https which allows access to the Web dashboard and port 1514 is a wazuh default communication port between the agent and the manager.

After I had restarted the agent on my fedora VM and restarted the manager and dashboard on my wazuh VM and this seems to have solved the problem.

I opened the Web dashboard on the mint VM and managed to log in the dashboard opened and it was on to the next problem,

The dashboard was saying that my fedora VM was being seen but had never connected to the dashboard.

So after reading even more information online and following guides I was unable to rectify the problem.

Although one article advised deleting the fedora VM from wazuh and reinstalling it this may have worked except when I looked at the logs for the agent on fedora were now saying that it couldn’t connect because there was a duplicate name issue. After some more googling I was not able to resolve the issue and decided to call it a day.

Lessons learn and takeaways.

 I wouldn’t say that this was a complete failure the things I can take away from this are I’ve learnt about 

1.      Command line in Linux

2.      I learnt about logs in Linux even though it was very basic and minimal  I think logging is important as it’s a great insight to issues on a machine. And looking at different logs is the best way to be able to understand what’s happening on a machine or piece of software.

3.      It proves that even when you follow the installation guide things can still go wrong.

Although this wasn’t the outcome I was hoping for or expecting I at least have learnt something from the experience and it certainly hasn’t stopped my journey in to getting wazuh to work on my home lab.

If any readers have tried to install wazuh in a home lab I’d be interested in hearing your experiences if it worked or if you had issues and how you resolved them.

I have some screenshots of this experience which I will add at a later date.

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