is one of the most popular questions asked on the snort-users mailing list…. Value-added resellers (VARs) and systems integrators (SIs) may need to provide customers with validation that the network intrusion detection system (IDS) is working as expected…. I reveal some common misperceptions and offer alternatives to satisfy the majority of readers. A stateless approach for triggering Snort alerts is to generate traffic that should trigger Snort rules, but doesn’t rely on parsing Snort rule sets…. I used the Debian package net/idswakeup on Ubuntu Linux against a FreeBSD sensor running Snort 2.6.1.5 and Sguil 0.6.1.