linkerd / linkerd/linkerd2

PCAP-NG Export

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#4,326 5 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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area/cli area/controller area/proxy gsoc help wanted
Dominant language
Go
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

## What problem are you trying to solve?

It is difficult to debug what is happening to the network traffic for workloads on Kubernetes. Linkerd provides `tap` and `stat` to provide some glimpses into what's happening. Many times, this is enough. Unfortunately, when low level problems and protocol issues crop up, the existing tools are not enough. This causes users to inject the debug container and `tcpdump` traffic on a pod by pod basis.

### How should the problem be solved?

Add PCAP-NG as an export format for `tap`. This can then be dumped locally or forwarded to Wireshark for analysis and debugging.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating tap's export path and the code that formats its output. Determine how a PCAP-NG stream can be produced for local dumping or Wireshark analysis; done means tap supports PCAP-NG export and the resulting capture can be analyzed as intended.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
go, kubernetes
Domain
networking, observability
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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