Tcpreplay

Tcpreplay (TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) Replay) is an open source and free software project implemented in C and designed to act as a command-line tool that comprises of several utilities for *NIX operating systems, allowing users to test a variety of network devices by using captured traffic via the libpcap library.

The program is written in the C programming language and it is fully compatible with various GNU/Linux distributions, as well as other UNIX-like systems, such as Solaris, BSD and Mac OS X.

What tools are included?

The program comes pre-loaded with several CLI tools, including tcpprep, tcprewrite, tcpreplay and tcpbridge. They allow you to classify network traffic as server and client, replay the traffic back onto the network, rewrite TCP/IP and Layer 2, 3 and 4 headers, as well as to bridge two network segments.

Designed for people who want to test network devices

Tcpreplay has been designed from the ground up as a suite of command-line utilities that can be used by those who want to test router, IPS (Intrusion Prevention System), UTM (Unified Threat Management), firewall and NIDS (Network Intrusion Detection System) network devices.

Getting started with Tcpreplay

To use the commands included in the Tcpreplay software to test your network hardware, you should first install the program by downloading the latest version from Softoware, where it is distributed for free as a source archive in the tar.gz file format.

To install it, save the archive locally, unpack it, open a terminal emulator and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files using the ‘cd’ command. Then, run the ‘./configure && make’ command, followed by the ‘make install’ command, which should be executed as root or with sudo.

After installation, run the ‘tcpreplay --help’ command in a terminal emulator to view the program’s default command-line options, as well as usage examples. In addition, you can check the program’s website for detailed usage examples.

What is new in this release:

• Support for [netmap] modified network drivers for 10GigE wire-speed performance
• Increased accuracy for playback speed
• Increased accuracy of results reporting
• Flow statistics including Flows Per Second (fps)
• Flow analysis for analysis and fine tuning of flow expiry timeouts
• Hundreds of thousands of flows per second (dependent flow sizes in pcap file)

What is new in version 4.1.0:

• Support for [netmap] modified network drivers for 10GigE wire-speed performance
• Increased accuracy for playback speed
• Increased accuracy of results reporting
• Flow statistics including Flows Per Second (fps)
• Flow analysis for analysis and fine tuning of flow expiry timeouts
• Hundreds of thousands of flows per second (dependent flow sizes in pcap file)

What is new in version 4.0.3:

• This version fixes build issues reported by some users.

What is new in version 4.0.1:

• This version includes minor fixes and performance enhancements to the NetFlow features introduced in version 4.0.0.
• Fixes include support for netmap version 10 API, improvements to netmap performance on Intel GigE "igb" server NICs, and removal of several compiler errors.

What is new in version 3.4.3:

• Link libnl when newer versions of libpcap require it (#397)
• Ship m4 directory (#398)
• Upgrade to latest autotools scripts (#400)
• Fix error message when running autogen.sh (#401)

What is new in version 3.4.2:

• Added extensive IPv6 support to tcprewrite & tcpreplay-edit (#11)
• Add IPv6 fragroute support (#388)
• Add IPv6 decoding support to tcpprep (#11)
• Fix compile time error in err.h (#390)
• Add --endpoints support in tcpreplay-edit (#393)

What is new in version 3.4.1:

• Being a minor release, this is mostly bugfixes and feature requests reported by users, including making tcpreplay and tcprewrite into a single tool again by default. To allow this while still providing for maximum performance when necessary, there are now two tcpreplay binaries: tcpreplay and tcpreplay-edit.

What is new in version 3.4.0:

• This release includes over six months of bugfixes and enhancements centering on performance, portability, and packet editing.