First Steps and Concepts

Documentation

Some Words About Packet Analyzes

  • Don't capture data live - capture the data via Tcpdump and analyze the recorded data off-line
  • If you know what you want to analyze you can adjust tcpdump to capture the required data
  • Capture the complete packet (-s 0, snaplen)
  • Make backups of your traces (just for the case you missed something)
  • Don't use one tool, find the most useful tool for your requirements
  • Last but not least: question the results!

A last word: Captcp is not optimized to analyze huge PCAP files with millions of TCP connections. Captcp is primary designed and optimized to analyze one TCP connection/flow. If you have a really large PCAP file (say 1 GB and larger) you can use tcpslit to separate TCP connections before. Under normal circumstances this is not required.

General Synopsis

Captcp syntax is similar to git or perf: captcp module <module-args> pcap-file. To get a overview over all arguments for a given submodule you can call captcp module --help. Another similarity for all modules is the verbose mode: captcp module --verbose <debug | info | warning | error>

Connections and Flows

A fundamental concept of Captcp are Connections and Flows. Connections are bidirectional between two TCP endpoints. A connection consist of two flows - flows are unidirectional. It can happened that a connection consist of only one flow because the recorded duration was to short or packets are missing - but this is an exception. Via captcp statistic <pcapfile> all connections and flows of a PCAP file can be displayed. The numbering (e.g. 1, 2, 3, for a connection and 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2) is consistent across all captcp modules. So often you start by identifying the relevant connection (or flow) and limit the analysis for these connection (or flow).

What you see is not what you get

Attention: if you capture traffic nowadays you may not capture real wire data! Current network adapters support offloading capabilities. It is wise to disable all offloading capabilities if you want a realistic behaviour if you trace traffic from the sender machine.

You will note these effects if you realize more TCP ACK packets then Data packets or when the data size is larger then the Maximum Segment Size.

ethtool -K ethN rx off tx off sg off tso off