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@(#) $Header: /tcpdump/master/libpcap/README,v 1.24 2001/06/05 03:45:55 guy Exp $ (LBL) LIBPCAP 0.6.2 Now maintained by "The Tcpdump Group" See www.tcpdump.org Please send inquiries/comments/reports to tcpdump-workers@tcpdump.org Anonymous CVS is available via: cvs -d :pserver:tcpdump@cvs.tcpdump.org:/tcpdump/master login (password "anoncvs") cvs -d :pserver:tcpdump@cvs.tcpdump.org:/tcpdump/master checkout libpcap Version 0.6.2 of LIBPCAP can be retrieved with the CVS tag "libpcap_0_6rel2": cvs -d :pserver:tcpdump@cvs.tcpdump.org:/tcpdump/master checkout -r libpcap_0_6rel2 libpcap Please send patches against the master copy to patches@tcpdump.org. formerly from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Network Research Group <libpcap@ee.lbl.gov> ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/libpcap.tar.Z (0.4) This directory contains source code for libpcap, a system-independent interface for user-level packet capture. libpcap provides a portable framework for low-level network monitoring. Applications include network statistics collection, security monitoring, network debugging, etc. Since almost every system vendor provides a different interface for packet capture, and since we've developed several tools that require this functionality, we've created this system-independent API to ease in porting and to alleviate the need for several system-dependent packet capture modules in each application. Note well: this interface is new and is likely to change. The libpcap interface supports a filtering mechanism based on the architecture in the BSD packet filter. BPF is described in the 1993 Winter Usenix paper ``The BSD Packet Filter: A New Architecture for User-level Packet Capture''. A compressed postscript version is in: ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/papers/bpf-usenix93.ps.Z. Although most packet capture interfaces support in-kernel filtering, libpcap utilizes in-kernel filtering only for the BPF interface. On systems that don't have BPF, all packets are read into user-space and the BPF filters are evaluated in the libpcap library, incurring added overhead (especially, for selective filters). Ideally, libpcap would translate BPF filters into a filter program that is compatible with the underlying kernel subsystem, but this is not yet implemented. BPF is standard in 4.4BSD, BSD/OS, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. DEC OSF/1 uses the packetfilter interface but has been extended to accept BPF filters (which libpcap utilizes). Also, you can add BPF filter support to Ultrix using the kernel source and/or object patches available in: ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/net/bpfext42.tar.Z. Problems, bugs, questions, desirable enhancements, etc. should be sent to the address "tcpdump-workers@tcpdump.org". Source code contributions, etc. should be sent to the email address "patches@tcpdump.org". Current versions can be found at www.tcpdump.org - The TCPdump team