3 Understanding tcpprep

3.1 What is tcpprep?

Tcpreplay can send traffic out two network cards, however it requires the calculations be done in real-time. These calculations can be expensive and can significantly reduce the throughput of tcpreplay.

Tcpprep is a libpcap pre-processor for tcpreplay which enables using two network cards to send traffic without the performance hit of doing the calculations in real-time.

3.2 How does tcpprep work?

Tcpprep reads in a libpcap (tcpdump) formatted capture file and does some processing to generate a tcpreplay cache file. This cache file tells tcpreplay which interface a given packet should be sent out of.

3.3 Does tcpprep modify my libpcap file?

No.

3.4 Why use tcpprep?

There are three major reasons to use tcpprep:

1. Tcpprep can split traffic based upon more methods and criteria then tcpreplay.
2. By pre-processing the pcap, tcpreplay has a higher theoretical maximum throughput.
3. By pre-processing the pcap, tcpreplay can be more accurate in timing when replaying traffic at normal speed.

3.5 Can a cache file be used for multiple (different) libpcap files?

Cache files have nothing linking them to a given libpcap file, so there is nothing to stop you from doing this. However running tcpreplay with a cache file from a different libpcap source file is likely to cause a lot of problems and is not supported.

3.6 Why would I want to use tcpreplay with two network cards?

Tcpreplay traditionally is good for putting traffic on a given network, often used to test a network intrusion detection system (NIDS). However, there are cases where putting traffic onto a subnet in this manner is not good enough- you have to be able to send traffic *through* a device such as a router, firewall, or bridge.

In these cases, being able to use a single source file (libpcap) for both ends of the connection solves this problem.

3.7 How big are the cache files?

Very small. Actual size depends on the number of packets in the dump file. Two bits of data is stored for each packet. On a test using a 900MB dump file containing over 500,000 packets, the cache file was only 150K.