Background

It's been about 6 years since I talked about my project ONICS in HPR 1350

ONICS stands for Open Network Inpection Command Suite

I created ONICS as because I thought it would be neat to have a suite of tools that could manipulate packets on the command line in a way similar to how tools lik sed, awk, grep, cut, and so forth manipulate text.

Installing

Not currently maintained in any package distributions

Maintainers who are interested in doing so are welcome

Install by source

$ git clone https://gitlab.com/catlib/catlib

$ cd catlib

$ make

$ cd ..

$ git clone https://gitlab.com/onics/onics

$ cd onics

$ ./configure

$ make

$ make test

$ sudo make install

$ make veryclean

Can always uninstall cleanly from the source directory

$ make uninstall

Alternate to installation is to stop at 'make test' and then add to 'onics/bin' and 'onics/scripts' to your path.

Documentation

Manpages are available in onics/doc directory if you aren't installing locally. They are quite extensive.

If installed locally, starting with:

$ man onics

XPKT Format

PCAP format is outdated and not very extensible

I want to be able to annotate with interface IDs, flow IDs, packet numbers, classification info, header offsets, etc...

First and foremost, the file header prevents just cating files together.

it makes merging live streams more difficult

pcapng improves things but still has global file header

First Programs

Let's first capture in the traditional way

$ sudo tcpdump -i eth0 -c 5 -w file1.pcap

First program is to capture packets from the wire:

$ sudo pktin eth0 > file2.xpkt

If not running as root

$ sudo chown myname file1.pcap file2.xpkt

Let's dump them:

$ tcpdump -r file1.pcap

$ xpktdump file2.xpkt

Now lets convert the PCAP to XPKT

$ pc2xpkt file1.pcap file1.xpkt

or

$ pc2xpkt file1.pcap > file1.xpkt

or

$ pc2xpkt < file1.pcap > file1.xpkt

or

$ cat file1.pcap | pc2xpkt > file1.xpkt

Now we can dump file1 using xpktdump:

$ xpktdump file1.xpkt

Something we can't do w/ tcpdump

Lets now merge them one after another

$ cat file1.xpkt file2.xpkt > merged.xpkt

$ xpktdump merged.xpkt

Of course there's a simpler way

$ cat file1.xpkt file2.xpkt | xpktdump

Convert back to pcap:

Let's convert file2 to PCAP

$ xpkt2pc file2.xpkt file2.pcap

or

$ xpkt2pc < file2.xpkt > file2.pcap

or

$ xpkt2pc file2.xpkt > file2.pcap

or

$ cat file2.xpkt | xpkt2pc > file2.pcap

Let's look at the stream using tcpdump:

$ tcpdump -r file2.pcap

If we didn't want to actually store as a PCAP

$ xpkt2pc file2.xpkt | tcpdump -r -

Let's concatenate and dump using tcpdump

$ cat file1.xpkt file2.xpkt | xpkt2pc | tcpdump -r | less

Sending packets:

$ sudo tcpdump -i eth0 # in one terminal

$ sudo pktout -i eth0 file1.xpkt

or

$ sudo