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.

06/18/06

Murphy is my hero

I’m a big believer in Murphy’s Law… especially when it comes to computers. If you work with computers long enough, you learn to expect the unexpected.

Case in point:

My company has a server. It’s got a crappy Adaptec RAID card which is smart enough to tell me that one of the four drives has a problem, but not WHICH drive. The only solution was to get four new drives, replace all the existing drives and get rid of the crappy Adaptec card.

Problems:

  • RAID controller doesn’t seem to like a mix of the old SATA1 and the new SATA2 drives. It picks a random number of drives (0-4) to marked as failed during boot. About 5-10 reboots are required before it decides all the drives are good. Since the system takes forever to initialize it’s BIOS and the BIOS of the card, that’s about 7-15min.
  • RAID controller won’t allow the OS to see the individual drives unless it’s a part of a RAID array. Reboot 10 more times after marking the four drives as “raw volumes”.
  • During the coping of files from the old RAID array to the new software RAID array, a drive fails in the original array which slows down the copy.
  • Grub segfaults when trying to write the MBR to the new drives.
  • My CD copy of Recovery is Possible is apparently too scrached up to be useful. Must re-download/burn an ISO.
  • This whole process was supposed to take about 7hrs max. Heh.
  • A 2nd drive has failed from the original array. It is now completely failed and all data on it unrecoverable. I no longer have a fail-safe plan.
  • The Marvell SATA chipset on the motherboard isn’t supported by my kernel. I have to keep using the crappy Adaptec SATA RAID card (w/o the raid).
  • Oh, looks like I’m going to miss a party since this is taking so long.
  • Yep missing the party. Also apparently CentOS 4.1’s initrd doesn’t support root on LVM2. This is bad since my root partition is on RAID5/LVM2.
  • Of course it helps if you install the GRUB boot loader in the MBR not a partition. Doh.

Final (temporary) solution:

  • Put one of the old drives back in the system. Yes, this causes disk detection errors at boot, but I need another disk.
  • Make this new disk the boot/root filesystem disk.
  • This allows me to boot off the harddrives (yea!) and get a root filesystem running in order to start LVM2 and mount /home and /var
  • At some point in time, the software raid got confused and marked one partition offline for each of a raid1 and raid5 array. Now I get to resync them (should only take about 500minutes according to /proc/mdstat).

Total time: 10am-5pm, 7-10pm on Sat. 9am-6pm on Sun.

06/12/06

DHS: So glad they’re on our side!

Let’s see, a guy walks into the DHS HQ with a fake Mexican ID which even if it was real wasn’t considered valid identification. So what do the rocket scientists for security do? Why they let him in of course!

Now of course, the fake ID was really good. You’d have to be a real expert to pick up on subtle mistakes like stating Tijuana is in Brittish Columbia (B.C.), claiming to live on “123 Fraud Blvd.” and misspelling “Staton Island, N.Y.”. Yep, I can really understand how the crack DHS security force could let such an well forged ID through the front door.

The good news? “DHS is following up on these allegations and will take necessary actions to ensure there is not another occurrence of this type”. I know I’ll sure sleep better knowing they’re on the case!

06/11/06

Making progress

Woot. Actually making progress with the tcpedit libraryization. The API is finally coming together and seems usable. One of these days, I should make libtcpedit a plugin chain rather then a bunch of static code, but that’s like a 4.0 feature. :)

Anyways, hopefully in a couple of weeks beta8 will be ready to go. I don’t think tcpbridge will be working, but that can come later.

06/10/06

Tcpreplay News moves to my blog

I’ve come to the realization that my blog is a much better way of reporting of what’s going on with tcpreplay then the news section, so I’ve decided to move to using the blog for now on.

Anyways, with that said, tcpreplay is still in active development as I have time. I know it’s been a long long time since the last 3.0beta release, but since then I’ve doing a major rewrite to clean up the code. Like most rewrites I’m sure it’ll pay off dividends in the long run, but it’s taking longer then I had hoped. Once the rewrite is complete, I’ll move towards a release early, release often methodology.

I’m also still in the process of updating all the docs so that people can be more familar with the features in the Tcpreplay suite- lately I’ve met a lot of people who don’t know that tcpreplay can edit packets or supports splitting traffic between two interfaces.