Author: Alfredo Cardigliano

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nDPI

How to Dump, Index, and Layer-7 Filter Network Traffic at High Speed
n2disk is an application that many of the ntop community uses to dump traffic up to 100 Gbit. What few people know is that n2disk can index data not just using packet header information (i.e. IP, port. VLAN, MAC…) but also using nDPI to produce an index that contains application protocol information. This filtering can happen: During packet capture (i.e. instruct n2disk to avoid dumping specific protocols such as Netflix or YouTube that take up a lot of disk space and that are usually harmless). While extracting packets from stored …
PF_RING

Introducing PF_RING ZC support for Intel E810-based 100G adapters
Last year Intel announced a new family of 100 Gigabit network adapters, code-name Columbiaville. These new adapters, based on the new Intel Ethernet Controller E810, support 10/25/50/100 Gbps link speeds and provide programmable offload capabilities. Programmability 800 Series adapters implement new features to improve connectivity, storage protocols, and programmability, also thanks to the Dynamic Device Personalization (DDP) technology which adds support for a programmable pipeline. In fact, with DDP, a parser embedded in the controller can support the software parsing custom protocols and manipulating outgoing packets, paving the way to …
n2disk

Howto Build a 100 Gbit (Drop-Free) Continuous Packet Recorder using n2disk [Part 3]
In the first post of this series (part 1) we described how to build a 2×10 Gbit continuous packet recorder using n2disk and PF_RING, in the second post (part 2) we described what hardware is required to scale from 10 Gbit to 100 Gbit. One more year has past now and we matured more experience with 100 Gbit recording, it’s time to refresh the previous posts and share more information about the new capture and storage technologies and configurations in order to build a recorder able to dump 100+ Gbit line-rate small-packets sustained …
nScrub

Introducing nScrub 1.4 with IPv6 Support
This is to introduce the new nScrub 1.4 stable. Besides a few bug fixes (mainly to the API) this release introduces many improvements, including: Full IPv6 support both in routing and bridge mode. Improved TCP protection, it is now possible to use SYN Proxy in asymmetric mode. Hardware bypass with watchdog support as failover mechanism in case of system failures or to handle maintenance. New plugins SDK to easily extend the core engine with custom protection algorithms. Native systemd support for multiple instances to handle multiple network segments. Support for Ubuntu …
ntop

Introducing PF_RING 7.6: Flow Processing Made Easy with PF_RING FT
This is to announce a new PF_RING major release 7.6. Besides bug fixes and drivers updates to improve compatibility with latest kernels (including those shipped with Debian 10 and CentOS 8) this release includes many enhancements to the PF_RING FT library, which delivers unprecedented flexibility and all the features a flow-based packet processing application requires. Latest additions include:. Flow slicing: the library delivers periodic flow updates, no need to wait for flow termination. Tunnels decoding: packets are decapsulated and information about the tunnel are exposed by the library. More flow …
n2disk

Introducing n2disk 3.4: 100 Gbit Traffic Dump to Disk
This is to announce a new n2disk release 3.4. In addition to major performance optimisations with FPGA-based NICs, this release adds new interesting features including the ability to filter traffic based on the application protocol, aggregate traffic from multiple (2+) ZC interfaces, a better disk space management in case of multiple output folders (also from the same volume), and other useful options. With the current n2disk release and adequate storage, it is now possible on FPGA-based NICs to dump up over 40 Gbit of traffic with a single n2disk instance. This …
ntop

Finding a Needle in a Haystack (was Traffic Disaggregation with Sub Interfaces in ntopng)
Network traffic moving across a link often contains various types of traffic, for example in large companies it can include a mix of traffic coming from: Employees network Core company servers Guests network Other Analysing the traffic as a whole is usually complicated and as a consequence many things are hard to see. It is more convenient to split it into smaller subsets based on traffic type and analyse it unbundled. This is because with a lot of heterogeneous traffic specific patters might be hard to be identified. In many …
n2disk

Combining Traffic Recording with Visibility at 100 Gbps
A few months ago, with ntopng 3.8, we introduced support for continuous traffic recording, that allows you to drill down historical data from the timeseries level up to raw packets. This is useful when troubleshooting a network issue or analysing a security event, by combining traffic visibility with raw traffic analysis. In order to record raw data ntopng leverages on the n2disk application, which is able to capture full-sized network packets at wire-speed up to 100 Gbps from a live network interface, and write them into pcap files without any packet …
n2disk

Building a (Cheap) Continuous Packet Recorder using n2disk and PF_RING [Part 2]
Continuous packet recorders are devices that capture raw traffic to disk, providing a window into network history, that allows you to go back in time when a network event occurs, and analyse traffic up to the packet level to find the exact network activity that caused the problem. n2disk is a software application part of the ntop suite able to capture traffic at high speed (it relies on the PF_RING packet capture framework, able to deliver line-rate packet capture up to 100 Gbit/s) and dump traffic to disk using the standard PCAP …
PF_RING

Introducing PF_RING Configuration Wizard
Getting started with PF_RING can be a bit tricky as it requires the creation of a few configuration files in order to setup the service, especially when ZC drivers need to be used. First of all it requires packages installation: PF_RING comes with a set of packages for installing the userspace libraries (pfring), the kernel module (pfring-dkms), and the ZC drivers (<driver model>-zc-dkms). Installing the main package, pfring, is quite intuitive and straightforward following the instructions available at http://packages.ntop.org , however installing and configuring the proper package when it comes to …
ntop

Introducing n2disk 3.2: towards 100 Gbit to disk
This is to announce a new n2disk release 3.2. This release, besides addressing a few issues, includes new juicy features: Multithreaded dump and support for multiple volumes. This is useful in a few cases: If you want to record traffic above 30-40 Gbit/s to HDDs or SSDs, you should pay attention to the RAID controller limit. In fact, even if you use many disks in a RAID 0 configurations, many controllers are not able to scale above 30-40 Gbit/s of sustained write throughput. Load-balancing traffic across multiple controllers could be …
ntop

Introducing PF_RING 7.4: PF_RING FT, Containers and Virtual Functions Support
This is to announce a new PF_RING major release 7.4. This release includes many improvements to the PF_RING FT library, which is now more mature thanks to new API functionalities and features that provide more flexibility. This release also addresses many issues, and moves a step forward in the same direction of release 7.2, which included full support for Containers and Namespaces, adding support for CoreOS containers and ZC Virtual Function drivers, technologies commonly available in cloud services. This is the complete changelog: PF_RING Library New pfring_open PF_RING_DO_NOT_STRIP_FCS flag to disable …

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