ipsumdump reads IP packets from the network (using libpcap, or packet sockets on Linux), or from a tcpdump(1) save file, and writes an ASCII summary of the packet data to the standard output. Comments on the first couple lines describe the summary’s contents; for example:

!IPSummaryDump 1.3
!creator "ipsumdump -i wvlan0"
!host no.lcdf.org
!runtime 996022410.322317 (Tue Jul 24 17:53:30 2001)
!data ip_src ip_dst
63.250.213.167 192.150.187.106
63.250.213.167 192.150.187.106
// ...

Two other programs are included. ipaggcreate processes traces and counts various properties of packet aggregates, making it easy to answer questions such as “What is the distribution of packets per TCP/UDP flow in this trace?” or “How long does it take to encounter 10000 different IP addresses in this trace?” ipaggmanip takes aggregate files produced by ipaggcreate and manipulates them in various ways.

If you are building from a source repository (git), you will need to generate configure scripts. (This is not necessary if you downloaded a tarball.) Run ./bootstrap.sh from the top directory.

Thereafter installation is standard. Run ./configure, supplying any options, then make install. Documentation is supplied in manual page format; after make install, try man ipsumdump. (Before installation, try pod2man ipsumdump.pod | nroff -man | less.) Run ipsumdump --help to see what options are available.

ipsumdump is built from the Click modular router, an extensible system for processing packets. Click routers consist of C++ components called elements. While some elements run only in a Linux kernel, most can run either in the kernel or in user space, and there are user-level elements for reading packets from libpcap or from tcpdump files.

The ipsumdump program just builds up a simple Click configuration and runs it, as if by the click user-level driver. However, you don't need to install Click to run ipsumdump; the libclick directory contains all the relevant parts of Click, bundled into a library.

If you’re curious, try running ipsumdump --config with some other options to see the Click configuration ipsumdump would run. Only three source files had to be written from scratch: src/ipsumdump.cc, src/toipsumdump.cc, and src/toipsumdump.hh. The rest came from Click itself.

This is, I think, a pleasant way to write a packet processor!

The Click source distribution: https://github.com/kohler/click/

Eddie Kohler Harvard University (UCLA and ICIR/International Computer Science Institute) kohler@seas.harvard.edu

Copyright (c) 2001-2003 International Computer Science Institute Copyright (c) 2004-2011 Regents of the University of California Copyright (c) 2008 Meraki, Inc. Copyright (c) 2001-2016 Eddie Kohler

The anonymization algorithm was borrowed from tcpdpriv by Greg Minshall.

Thanks to Vern Paxson and Lee Breslau for comments and suggestions.

ipsumdump is available under the Click license, a BSD-like license. See the file libclick*/LICENSE for full license terms.