Chapter 30. ClientServer Design Alternatives

29.1 Introduction

Providing access to the datalink layer for an application is a powerful feature that is available with most current operating systems. This provides the following capabilities:

• The ability to watch the packets received by the datalink layer, allowing programs such as tcpdump to be run on normal computer systems (as opposed to dedicated hardware devices to watch packets). When combined with the capability of the network interface to go into a promiscuous mode , this allows an application to watch all the packets on the local cable, not just the packets destined for the host on which the program is running.

  This ability is less useful in switched networks, which have become quite common. This is because the switch only passes traffic to a port if it is addressed to the device or devices attached to that port (unicast, multicast, or broadcast). To monitor traffic carried on other ports of the switch, the switch port must be configured to receive other traffic, often called monitor mode or port mirroring . Note that many devices that you might not expect to be switches actually are, for example, a dual-speed 10/100Mbps hub is usually a two-port switch: one port for the 100Mbps systems and the other for the 10Mbps systems.

• The ability to run certain programs as normal applications instead of as part of the kernel. For example, most Unix versions of an RARP server are normal applications that read RARP requests from the datalink (RARP requests are not IP datagrams) and then write the reply back to the datalink.

The three common methods to access the datalink layer under Unix are the BSD Packet Filter (BPF), the SVR4 Datalink Provider Interface (DLPI), and the Linux SOCK_PACKET interface. We present an overview of these three, but then describe libpcap , the publicly available packet capture library. This library works with all three and using this library makes our programs independent of the actual datalink access provided by the OS. We describe this library by developing a program that sends DNS queries to a name server (we build our own UDP datagrams and write them to a raw socket) and reading the reply using libpcap to determine if the name server enables UDP checksums.