On 14-Sep-2001 Rino Mardo wrote: > hi. a friend of mine asked but i couldn't give a definite, not even > an, answer so i was hoping someone here can shed a light: > > "I'm checking out snort, a network intrusion detection system. I > noticed that when I start the snort daemon to listen on eth0 (my NIC > connected to the Internet), the interface enters promiscuous mode. I know > what promiscuous mode is, but I'm wondering what the impacts of the > device's being on promiscuous mode will be. >
The NIC will be working a little more because it reacts to every packet on the wire, even ones it would usually not be interested in. This will likely mean a little more OS/CPU work as well.
