Add FAQ entry about disabling NIC offloading features.

This commit is contained in:
Jon Siwek 2012-01-06 13:10:07 -06:00
parent e48f62622c
commit e83df9487a

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@ -28,6 +28,23 @@ Here are some pointers to more information:
Lothar Braun et. al evaluates packet capture performance on
commodity hardware
Are there any gotchas regarding interface configuration for live capture? Or why might I be seeing abnormally large packets much greater than interface MTU?
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Some NICs offload the reassembly of traffic into "superpackets" so that
fewer packets are then passed up the stack (e.g. "TCP segmentation
offload", or "generic segmentation offload"). The result is that the
capturing application will observe packets much larger than the MTU size
of the interface they were captured from and may also interfere with the
maximum packet capture length, ``snaplen``, so it's a good idea to disable
an interface's offloading features.
You can use the ``ethtool`` program on Linux to view and disable
offloading features of an interface. See this page for more explicit
directions:
http://securityonion.blogspot.com/2011/10/when-is-full-packet-capture-not-full.html
What does an error message like ``internal error: NB-DNS error`` mean?
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