An intrusion detection system on its own isn't any good whatsoever; it needs a set of eyes to look over the logs and take action or some sort of automated notification system. IPCop's web interface provides a primitive first look at what is going on in the network.
This can be found under the Logs IDS Logs menu option as shown in the following figure:
The log screen defaults to today's date and gives us some interesting information. Today on December 20th 381 rules were activated, meaning that Snort noticed 381 possible attacks on the network. This number is abnormally high as the data was generated artificially by the author, but generally you would expect to see a few rules activated per day depending on the size of your network. Home users should expect to see a lot of port scans and automated worm attacks for example. If we take a closer look at one of the rules, we can see what Snort has shown us in the logs.
Date:12/20 12:51:41 Name:SNMP request udp
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