/usr/local/bin/oinkmaster.pl: Error: the output directory “/etc/snort/rules” isn’t writable by you.

I recently upgrade my IPCop to version 1.4.16 but my Snort (Intrusion Detection System) failed to load the latest rules set. The install logs revealed the error below.

/usr/local/bin/oinkmaster.pl: Error: the output directory “/etc/snort/rules” isn’t writable by you.

The fix was simple. simply change the permission for the “/etc/snort/rules” folder so that the owner is “snort” using the command below.

# chown -R snort:snort /etc/snort/rules
# ls -l /etc/snort/ | grep drw
drwxr-xr-x 2 snort snort 4096 2007-09-18 18:20 rules