Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] tcpdump vs ethereal

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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 14:27:12 -0800

On Nov 19, 2003, at 1:56 PM, Guy Harris wrote:

On Nov 19, 2003, at 1:25 PM, Ian Schorr wrote:

However, Sniffer's Infinistream product is able to capture packets *to disk* at near- full-duplex gigabit speeds without dropping packets with what is essentially high-end PC hardware,

...using "patent-pending" technology:

	http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/print.php/1452041

...built, if this article is to believed (which it might well not be, given that sometimes computer-industry journalism isn't as factually correct as one might like) atop an OS with a GPLed kernel:

	http://security.itworld.com/4352/030210infinistream/page_1.html

"The new product, called InfiniStream, captures all of a network's traffic and stores that information on a hardware device called a "Capture Engine."

A stripped-down Linux appliance outfitted with RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) 5 storage, the Capture Engine stores up to 2.8 terabytes of network traffic and can digest a wide range of streams including e-mail, Web (HTTP), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and voice over IP traffic, according to Chris Thompson, vice president of marketing at NAI."

although perhaps that Canopy Group company I mentioned might succeed in its valiant effort to prove that the GPL is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution, or whatever it is Darl's claiming this week.

It might involve a binary kernel module, or the memory-mapped turbopacket stuff, combined with writing either to a raw RAID array or to a thin file system (or maybe one of the Linux file systems is fast enough).