anyone here done any work with Napatech cards?

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BLinux

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Jul 7, 2016
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I'm working on a project for a client and they are building packet capture/analysis machines with Napatech cards. My work for them has nothing to do with that part, I'm just building communications/clustering software for all the packet capture machines to work together. But I'm curious about this Napatech stuff and wondering if anyone here can shed some light on it?
 

aero

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Apr 27, 2016
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I have worked with napatech capture cards before. They're fpga based cards capable of lossless capture. Very similar to the more popular Endace brand.

I say capable of lossless capture because your storage subsystem also needs to be fast enough if you're writing to disk.

What did you want to know about them?
 

BLinux

cat lover server enthusiast
Jul 7, 2016
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I have worked with napatech capture cards before. They're fpga based cards capable of lossless capture. Very similar to the more popular Endace brand.

I say capable of lossless capture because your storage subsystem also needs to be fast enough if you're writing to disk.

What did you want to know about them?
thanks for responding... wasn't sure if anyone would.

how hard are they to program? what language bindings are available and which ones are better than other? what kind of capabilities can i gain with it that I don't get with a regular NIC + software?

assuming i have storage that is fast enough to write all the incoming data, how does the technology guarantee lossless capture? are there any edge cases where it has problems?
 

aero

Active Member
Apr 27, 2016
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I'm not a developer, I'm a systems engineer, so I can't speak to the functionality/usability of the API.

However, I've used their provided sample capture binary with great success.

Other great things about it...
Super high precision hardware timestamps, 1ns resolution
Supports both PTP and pps timing

Bypasses kernel, directly to user space

In hardware traffic filtering

Can process line rate 10g at 64 byte packets, not all cards can do that