Attention Pfsense users:
We recently were in touch with the package maintainer for Snort on pfsense, to which he was so kind to update the "Rules Update Start Time" to be random on install in version v3.2.9.10_3.
For more information about this update, please check out Bill's forum post here.
This update randomizes the start time of the Rules Update for every installation so that we don't have every installation of pfsense in the world simultaneously hitting Snort.org to check for updates all in the same second. As you can imagine, this causes quite a bit of a traffic spike on the site.
What we'd like is for all pfsense users is to either update their package, or to change the "Rules Update Start Time" entry to some random minute in the hour. Obviously not all at :15, :30 or :45, but pick a more random time.
This will help up tremendously to load balance out the amount of traffic headed to Snort.org.