Yearly Archives: 2006

08/8/06

Help me help you.

So here’s the deal: I don’t charge a single cent for tcpreplay regardless if you’re using it for educational or commercial use. You can even embed tcpreplay in your product and sell it, I don’t care.

I don’t charge for the docs, man pages, or FAQ even though I spend quite a bit of time trying to keep the docs up to date, accurate and useful. I’m also more then happy to provide free technical support to anyone who emails the tcpreplay-users mailing list. Having people use the list means that the questions and answers are archived for future use and it gives other people a chance to help you out. If you only email me, then only I can help you and nobody else can benifit from the answer.

I suppose there are two ways you can look at this, “something for nothing” or “you get what you pay for”; either way, it seems like a pretty good deal to me. On the other side of the coin, in the last 5 years I’ve been working on tcpreplay, I’ve gotten little fame, a few “thank you” and a DVD. Obviously, I’m not doing this for the money.

So here’s the rub, don’t get offended when I balk at giving you free, 1-on-1 support directly over email. Contrary to popular belief in the open source community, developers are not your slaves. We don’t have to give you support. We help out users because we like to and because it helps make our project better. While I’m sure some developers are more then happy to go to great lengths to help you with your problems (even when they are clearly between the chair and keyboard), you’ll have to excuse me if I’m too busy to do so. And you’ll have to excuse me if I do a poor job of explaining it for the hundredth time to someone who was too lazy to read the support page without sounding like an a**hole.

So please, please use the tcpreplay-users mailing list.

08/6/06

3.0.beta10 is out the door

Yep, 3.0.beta10 is available here. So far, at least one person has compiled it successfully, so at least this release is already better then beta8. :)

Anyways, as stated in the release notes, this is the final beta release for 3.0. I’m planning on one release candidate which will have a working tcpbridge (which has been broken since moving all the editing code to libtcpedit) and then put out 3.0.0 shortly after that depending on any bugs people find.

Anyways, give it a try and let me know how it well works for you!

08/3/06

Big changes in 3.0.beta10

Just a quick note to everyone paying attention that 3.0.beta10 is almost ready. Some rather significant changes since beta9:

  • Libnet is now completely optional. I’ve created an abstraction layer supporting BSD’s BPF, Linux’s PF_PACKET, libpcap’s pcap_inject() and libnet’s packet injection methods. So while you can still use libnet, in many cases you won’t need it which should hopefully make installation a lot easier for many people.
  • tcpprep and tcprewrite no longer need to run as root. tcpreplay still does for obvious reasons.
  • A new and improved packet timing method is available in tcpreplay. Those people needing more accurate inter-packet delays should be better served by this method.
  • tcprewrite now can skip rewriting broadcast/multicast IP and MAC addresses which is good news when your pcap contains ARP’s or DHCP packets.
  • Various smaller bug fixes which some people noticed and some people didn’t.
08/2/06

Nework maintenance

According to Speakeasy:

On Wednesday night/Thursday morning, August 9th and August 10th 2006, we
will be performing scheduled maintenance on the Point of Presence (POP)
through which your Broadband connection is routed.

Maintenance will begin at 11:59 PM PDT on Wednesday night and end by
03:00 AM PDT on Thursday morning. While you will experience a service
disruption during this time, it is unlikely that your service outage
will extend through the entire time frame. Service interruptions
during a routine maintenance event like this often last only a few
minutes.

So expect synfin.net to go dark for a little while I guess…

07/27/06

3.0 out this year (I hope)

Well looks like all the critical bugs with the tcpreplay 3.0.beta8 were fixed in beta9 (at least everyone has stopped complaining), and so I’ve started working on beta10 which should hopefully be the final beta release for 3.0. Mostly the goal of beta10 is to remove libnet as a dependancy which should make compiling tcpreplay much easier for many people.

After beta10, I’ve scheduled one release candidate for early October to finish up tcpbridge and hopefully the offical 3.0 release will go out in early November. So based on past experiance and schedule slippages, I’d guess we’ll see 3.0 sometime around Christmas. :)

Either way, just want to remind everyone to keep those bug reports and feature requests coming in.

07/17/06

Murphy gets me again…

Yep… I do the first release of tcpreplay in nearly a year and what happens? I find out that it has a huge bug which probably prevents it from compiling on anyone’s computer except my development box.

*sigh*

Anyways, 3.0.beta9 is out so go get it.

On a side note, I got some spam today which included the graphic below; the rest was in russian and I have no idea what (if anything) they were selling, but this was classic:

Combat Kitty

07/16/06

Finally…

After nearly a year between releases (has it been that long??), 3.0beta8 is finally out the door. The changes are actually quite massive due to a huge rewriting effort; and with many additional unit tests (via ‘make test’) code quality should be pretty good too.

This is the first release with a working tcprewrite and modular packet editing code (tcpedit). I\’ve also included a number of end-user requested features. The only “issue” really left right now is that tcpbridge is going out the door untested and I doubt it works. I’ll be sure it’s ready for 3.0 though.

Anyways, be sure to give it a download and file any bugs that you find.

07/6/06

Headhunters!

Got a phone call from a headhunter yesterday. I’m not sure if this is really a rant or just funny watching the headhunter squirm, I’ll let you decide. Conversation went sorta like this:

Me: Hello?
HH: Hi, is this Aaron?
Me: Yes, who is this?
HH: Hi Aaron, this is ****** and I'm with Atlantis Partners.  I got your name from
someone who told me you're in charge of hiring for the engineering department. 
Is that true?
Me: Who exactly gave you my name?
HH: Who?
Me: Yes, who gave you my name as the hiring manager?
HH: Oh, I called the main number and the receptionist gave me your name.
Me: We don't have a receptionist.
HH: <silience>
Me: So where did you really get my name?
HH: Oh, I got it on the internet, I saw that your company had just recieved $10M 
in funding and I figured that ment you're probably hiring, is that true?
Me: Yes, we are hiring, but I don't work with people who lie to me.
HH: Excuse me?
Me: I said I don't work with people who lie to me.
HH: I didn't lie to you.
Me: You said you got my name from our receptionist, which we don't have. 
If that's not lying, please tell me what it is.
HH: Hello?
Me: Yes?
HH: I think we got off on the wrong start, how about we start over?
Me: No.
HH: Did I call at a bad time?
Me: No, your timing was perfect, I just don't work with people who lie to me.
HH: How about I call you tomorrow?
Me: I'd rather you didn't.
HH: I'll call you tomorrow.
Me: Ok

What I find amusing of course is that she lied for no reason whatsoever. Did she really think I was going to punish her for using Google? Anyways, still haven’t heard back from her, but the day is still young. The sad thing of course is that if she doesn’t call me back she that would be another lie… not the best way to start a business relationship!

[Update: Nope, she never called back.]

06/24/06

Boring…

So I’ve watched a few world cup games… mostly because nothing else was on TV at the time. One thing though I don’t really get is, why do people like soccer (or football for everyone outside of the US). I’ll admit that the players have to be in really good shape to be running around like that for 90 minutes, but the game has a number of fatal flaws IMHO:

  1. It’s painfully slow. Field is so big it takes forever to get from one side to another.
  2. American football, basketball (which I also don’t care for) and even icehockey have the concept of someone able to break away and having a solid chance of scoring. With so much playing field and so many players, breakaways just don’t seem to happen.
  3. Tie scores suck. The whole point of playing a competitive game is to see who is better. Ending a game with a tie score is pointless.
  4. Few scoring chances. I just finished watching Germany vs. Sweeden. They said that the German goalie stopped 6 balls that had a chance to score. That’s 6 scoring chances in 90 minutes. No wonder why there’s so little scoring.
  5. No instant replay. Nothing worse then your team loosing the game because of a bad call by the ref.
  6. Penalties don’t seem to be a big deal. In soccer, if you get a red card, you’re kicked out for the rest of the game and your team can’t replace you. But with so much playing field and players on each side running around, it doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal. The tide doesn’t turn and the other team doesn’t seem to get that big of an advantage. Even when down two players, you don’t see rampant scoring by the other side.
06/19/06

Suck

Well looks like things have gone from bad to worse. Server has hung in an apparent I/O wait condition @ load of 25+. Existing ssh sessions have hung and can’t login. Ping still works. The word “hosed” comes to mind. Hopefully when I hit the reset button in the morning things will magically work.