Imagine you run a GSM network and you have multiple systems at the edge of your network that communicate with other systems. For debugging reasons you might want to collect traffic and then look at it to explore an issue or look at it systematically to improve your network, your roaming traffic, etc.

The first approach might be to run tcpdump on each of these systems, run it in a round-robin manner, compress the old traffic and then have a script that downloads/uploads it once a day to a central place. The issue is that each node needs to have enough disk space, you might not feel happy to keep old files on the edge or you just don’t know when is a good time to copy it.

Another approach is to create an aggregation framework. A client will use libpcap to capture the traffic and then redirect it to a central server. The central server will then store the traffic and might rotate based on size or age of the file. Old files can then be compressed and removed.

I created the osmo-pcap tool many years ago and have recently fixed a 64bit PCAP header issue (the timeval in the header is 32bit), collection of jumbo frames and now updated the README.md file of the project and created packages for Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, OpenSUSE, SLES and I made sure that it can be compiled and use on FreeBSD10 as well.

If you are using or decided not to use this software I would be very happy to hear about it.