For the past month or so, I’ve been working on getting tcpreplay working under Windows systems (Windows XP specifically). I’m happy to say that I’ve made good progress and now I’m looking for a few beta testers to try it out in a more “real world” environment and provide feedback.

Some words of warning:

• I’m not a Windows expert. The last version of Windows I used at all regularly was Win95. ’nuff said.
• You don’t have to be a Windows expert, but you should be very comfortable using it.
• It would be nice if you have some C coding experience under Windows. I don’t expect you to code or fix bugs, but someone who is familiar with C is likely to be able to provide better bug reports.
• You must be able to install WinPcap 4.0 and Cygwin. If that sounds scary or like too much work, then this isn’t for you.
• You must be willing/able to compile tcpreplay under Cygwin. I will not be providing binaries right now! You don’t need to have VC++ or anything like that, but being familiar with the GNU toolchain is a big plus. Sorry, but I can’t provide support getting Cygwin or the other dependencies like GNU Autogen installed.
• You must be able to communicate in English clearly. Since I won’t be able to sit down at your computer and help if there’s any problems, you’ll have to be able to email/IM/IRC me what’s going on. English doesn’t have to be your first language, but if you have a hard time communicating on technical topics, then this isn’t for you.

How do you get started? Easy, read my quick Win32 HowTo and get started! If you have any questions or problems, please email me at: synfinatic@gmail.com

Hot off my keyboard, beta13 is out. It’s actually the exact same tarball as the pre-release since nobody complained about any bugs, so I hereby declare it having fewer bugs then the last release, which is actually saying something.

Anyways, in this release I snuck in early Win32 support. Don’t bother downloading and trying it out if words like “Cygwin” and “aclocal” sound like aliens from outerspace. But if you do feel adventurous, download it, and feel free to drop in on the tcpreplay-users list and let me know how it goes.

So the endian issues in tcprewrite seem to be causing a lot of people grief, so I’ve decided to release a beta13 before RC1. However, since this wasn’t a planned release, some RC1 tickets are half done and incomplete. It doesn’t seem like this will cause anyone problems, but I haven’t done enough testing myself to release it to the entire world.

Hence, I’m posting a pre-beta13 so people can try it out and report any major bugs before I announce it to the rest of the world.

The major changes since beta12 are:

• Fixed detection of IPv4 packets on little-endian (Intel mostly) boxes. Prevented tcprewrite from editing most packets
• Fixed TCP/UDP checksum calculation on little-endian boxes
• Added –quiet flag to tcpreplay for Lothar
• The –seed flag should now generate the same IP’s on both little-endian & big-endian boxes
• The –skipl2broadcast flag now works as documented
• Adding L2 header for DLT_RAW encapsulated packets now works

Hopefully everyone here who has found a bug in the last few weeks will take a few minutes to give it a try and let me know how well it works out.

Since this is not GA code yet, I’m not posting it to SF, so you’ll have to get it here:

http://tcpreplay.synfin.net/tcpreplay-3.0.beta13.tar.gz

If you find any issues, please post them to the tcpreplay-users mailing list or open a ticket.

Thanks!

I’m happy to announce that I’ve used tcpreplay to send packets under WinXP/Cygwin. I have to say, the port has gone a lot smoother then I expected. I’d guess that getting basic functionality working was probably about 25-50 lines of code (most of that GNU Autoconf). While I have run into a few problems that I’m not sure yet how to resolve, things are actually going quite well so I’ve moved up Win32 support to 3.0.RC1. If anyone is familiar with creating an installer for Win32 (MSI or something like that???) I’d love to hear from you.

So I was looking at the tcpreplay download statistics and I made a very unexpected realization: roughly 30% of the downloads in the last 12 months were for the Windows version. Continue reading →

I’m happy to announce that 3.0.beta12 is finally out. This is a pretty important release because of the extensive changes to how different DLT/Layer2’s are supported in tcprewrite. In the past it was a big block of monolithic code which as many of you know had some serious bugs and limitations. 3.0.beta12 moves to a full plugin based architecture which makes adding support for various DLT’s very easy. Continue reading →

Thanks to Hewlett-Packard’s Linux Expertise Center, I’ve been able to make IA-64 binaries available for tcpreplay 2.3.5. Please note that these binaries were provided by HP and neither I nor any of the tcpreplay contributors support them. Furthermore, I seriously doubt that HP supports them either, but then again I didn’t ask.