Bug #1457: Non-standard prefixes used for file size indication - Suricata - Open Information Security Foundation

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Bug #1457

open

Non-standard prefixes used for file size indication

Added by James Moe almost 9 years ago. Updated over 4 years ago.

Status:

Feedback

Priority:

Low

Assignee:

OISF Dev

Target version:

TBD

Affected Versions:

Effort:

low

Difficulty:

low

Label:

Description

Here is a typical conversation regarding sizes in bytes:

i increased the stream memcap from default 32mb to 128mb;

I think you can try setting this to 512mb

i decreased the reassembly memcap from default 128mb to 64mb.

and this to 1024mb

mb = milli-bit
Mb = mega-bit
MB = mega-byte The metric and binary prefixes are case-sensitive. They are international standards. Usually the context is sufficient to sort what it really meant. But not always; and I find it bothersome to see such misuse.
I feel it professionally imperative to use the correct language, especially in the context of networking where traffic may be discussed in both bytes and bits per second. The same applies for most of the other letters, k (kilo) being an exception.
See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix> and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix>.

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Updated by Andreas Moe almost 9 years ago

Firstly standards are not laws, so no need for a system to follow it. But it might lower potential missunderstandings for newcommers to suri. Personally i (and a quick survey of a handfull coworkers) do not relly on the case of a unit suffix in our work to identify the unit of measure.

If this is a change we should do i am for it though, seems simple to implement, changing old configs should not be difficult eithet, and it would as mentioned lower the potential misunderstandigns for new users.

Also, not sure if this should be a bug or a feature request for suri to follow a given standard?

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Updated by James Moe almost 9 years ago

Andreas Moe wrote:

Firstly standards are not laws, so no need for a system to follow it.

W3C's standards, for instance HTML, are not law either. Life is much easier, though, when we conform to them.

Also, not sure if this should be a bug or a feature request for suri to follow a given standard?

It is bit of both.
bug: Correct the misuse of standard prefixes
feature: Conform to international standards regarding numeric prefixes

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Updated by Andreas Moe almost 9 years ago

Well, after thinking about this for a while, the correct suffixes would probably be ex MebiByte (MiB) and so on. This would be following the IEEE 1541-2002 standard. So i think using kilo and mega are wrong (since they are 10^n, and since this is "computer science" it should base itself on 2^n).

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