Blogs and Recent News
Everything and Anything that’s on the wire to disk and beyond
STAC Asia - Capturing OPRA with ease
FMADIO Presented at at STAC Asia conference hosted by the Singapore Stock Exchange. We discussed capturing the OPRA feed with ease and how to push that data downstream.
When is Packet Capture not just Packet Capture?
Packet Capture is the start of network visibility. FMADIO provides packet capture and then the next level of network visibility.
Push Compressed Realtime 1min OPRA Multicast PCAP
Push downstream OPRA 7TB Capture pseudo-realtime split by 1min per multicast group and compress x3 in the process.
Self Encrypting Drives - Everything You Need to Know
What is a Self Encrypting Drive? There’s a lot of misleading information about self-encrypting drives. Hopefully this post can clarify that without all the fazzle by looking at it from a purely functional point of view.
Raspberry Pi Network Monitor in AWS
Following on from the previous post, FMADIO-MINI is an ultra-low-cost but effective raspberry pi packet capture device suitable for capturing 100Mbps to sub-1Gbps links. That’s fantastic you have all this PCAP data, but who cares? Not a lot of people, to be perfectly honest, thus enter “PCAP2JSON”.
PCAP2JSON is a fully developed and production-proven network monitoring system that takes PCAP as an input and outputs half duplex snapshotted flows in JSON format. Think of it as a bit like the following.
Raspberry Pi Packet Capture
Hands up, who has a Raspberry PI? Betting that’s quite a few hands as it’s a fantastic bit of hardware and software.
Hands up, who wants to burn an SD Card to get a Raspberry Pi Packet Capture and an awesome Layer 2 - 4 plus GeoIP network monitoring tool and an IDS?
Yes, we at FMADIO have built exactly that, and it’s FREE!
PCAP Push Downstream
Our FMADIO 100Gbps does full line rate 100Gbps 149Mpps without loss, but so what? Capturing the data without loss is only the start, making network recorder traffic accessible beyond a Wireshark session is just as, if not more important.
10G Layer1 Packet Capture
Layer 1 XGMII 10G Packet Capture is here, almost. Our FMADIO 40G Packet capture and FMADIO 100G packet capture system all have a small built in 10G XGMII Layer 1 packet capture / trace utility. This is really helpful for debugging Layer 1 problems.
Centralized System Monitoring ELK
In any environment it is important to monitor the performance of systems, whether they be servers, infrastructure or monitoring and security tools. 10G 40G 100G packet capture systems are no different. Systems monitoring in large organizations, where a significant number of tools from different vendors are used, can be piecemeal unless an industry standard method is used. For decades the standard of choice was SNMP, and this still has its place, but in pursuit of simplicity and reliability, customers have pushed for other methods of monitoring.
FMADIO @ Sharkfest 2020
FMADIO are proud to once again be a sponsor of this year’s Sharkfest conference, and although this year the conference is being held online, we’ve no doubt that attendees will learn a lot.
SPIRENT 100GBPS CAPTURE BENCHMARKING
Many times there is disbelief about our sustained 100Gbps write to disk performance, but its real. We really do full sustained 100Gbps capture to disk. To prove this we used the gold standard, a Spirent 100Gbps tester to benchmark the capture performance of our system.
HOW MANY TB FOR X MINUTES @ Y GBPS ?
One of the most often asked questions is how much storage do I need for N minutes of capture @ X Gbps? Or the inverse of how many Minutes of X Gbps capture does can the capture system hold? We have condensed this into some easy to read charts.
PCAP NETWORK FLOW MONITORING
Good visibility and understanding of how traffic moves though your infrastructure is extremely critical to any Network Operations Center (NOC) and Security Operations Center (SOC) yet there are many approaches. Some are easy, some are hard, some are expensive and some are free.
FMADIO 10G 40G 100G Packet Capture systems combined with Open Source software enables a new kind of visibility and monitoring capabilities using our full packet capture systems. Our packet capture systems are multipurpose, used for troubleshooting, deep dives with Wireshark but also excellent monitoring capabilities!
FMADIO developed pcap2json utility which converts a PCAP into ElasticSearch bulk upload JSON, it even uploads fully compressed JSON directly into ElasticSearch without LogStash. Its free and OpenSource on GitHub, and can use any PCAP file.
GENERAL PURPOSE BPF COUNTER
Our Opensource network monitoring tool pcap_bpfcounter is released!