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pilcrow
Asked: 2010-03-16 07:44:02 +0800 CST

pcap stream rotation and pruning

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Some of my servers collect a lot of packet data. Is there a utility (or patch to tcpdump(1)) to log a pcap stream to disk which:

  1. Rotates based on size of data written
  2. Prunes written files, keeping only the N most recent
  3. Does not re-use output filenames
  4. Is self-contained
    (Ruling out, e.g., a rotation with external pruning via crond(8)+tmpwatch(8))

Basically I want a multilog or svlogd that groks the pcap record format.

The -W filecount option of tcpdump-4.0.0 "prunes" by recycling old filenames, which violates #3 above, forcing me to consult mtimes to determine recency and providing no guarantees against surprise truncation of the log file.

The -G option introduces strftime(2)-specifier support in output filenames, which would give me at least second-precision in file names, but I can't figure out how to get pruning to work with this scheme.

logging tcpdump pcap rotation

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Dumpcap should do what you need.

    dumpcap -w /tmp/output.pcap -b filesize:20000 -b files:10

    will rotate through a maximum of 10 files with a maximum size of 20 MB. Each file has a unique name, e.g. output_00018_20100315122857.pcap.

    Daemonlogger should work as well, but I haven't used it.

    • 4

  2. You might want Grok. It does what you want and then some.

    • 1