[Hampshire] Linux (or BSD) distributions for Snort?

Hi,

I'm just testing a server I've been building to host a NOC (Network
Operations Centre). The server has on it:

- Apache with SSL and PHP.
- Nessus for vulnerability scanning.
- Nagios for network monitoring.
- Snort for IDS on various network segments.
- (In the future: RCS for device configs).

The server is running Debian stable, for now. Normally this doesn't
present a problem but Snort in Debian is really out of date. Even
unstable has quite a dated version and now I've hit a problem where some
of the IDS rules I'm using stop Snort from loading because they're
designed for the 2.6.x tree of snort. There's also a bug in libpcap
which isn't fixed yet.

So I'm considering changing distributions to something that can offer me
"bleeding edge" software but also a stable base OS. Does anyone have any
recommendations? I may be asking for an impossible OS ;-)

At the moment I'm considering:

- CentOS
- FreeBSD
- Gentoo

The plus side with CentOS is that there's lots of RPMs floating around.
The downside is, I don't really like RPMs. They bring back bad memories.
I'd like to use a "no crap" OS. i.e. it installs a very very basic base
system and I can add what I want, rather than spending my time removing
the rubbish I don't need (which once again reminds me of when I've used
RedHat and SuSE in the past).

I like FreeBSD and I'm assuming Gentoo is on a par with FreeBSD in terms
of emerge v's FreeBSD's ports and the ability to "make world" to upgrade
the entire install?

I have searched for 3rd party Debian repositories that contain newer
builds of Snort but can't find anything good. Building the latest
Snort version from source isn't an option, from what I can tell, because
the libraries in Debian are also out of date.

Regards,
David.
-- 
 .''`.     David Ramsden
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