Hardware Requirements

There are two major components to Psyche: the netflow sensors and the analysis system. For the most part, the sensors are existing network infrastructure devices that can be configured to export flows. If your network cannot generate flow data natively, there are other options. See the NetFlow page for more details

The bigger the hardware, the better Psyche will run. Our primary test machine is a quad core Intel box with 4GB of memory and RAID0 SATA disks for storing the database. You can build a similar box (if you're paying attention to sales or NewEgg deals for about USD1,000. That said, any SATA enabled system you have should be capable of running Psyche effectively for small organizations

Software Requirements

OS: Psyche has been developed under Linux... Fedora to be precise. There's no reason it can't run under FreeBSD or Solaris, however. If you run Psyche under a different OS, please let us know.

Database: For a variety of reasons, Psyche uses Postgres for the backend database. Postgres supports the concept of a space limited DB that we hope to implement one day. Also, Postgres is not encumbered by the license issues that MySQL has. If you really want to use MySQL, there are adapters that present a Postgres interface to applicaitons but really put the data into a MySQL DB. In all seriousness, don't hurt yourself... just install Postgres

Other software: Psyche requires Turbogears, Python, and Apache. We also require the nfdump tools from the nfsen distribution. We've included a hacked up version of nfdump in our distribution that attempts to normalize the timestamps a bit. Feel free to use our version or the version in the nfsen package. Your choice.