Introduction

The program pktcollector can get packets from reading a pcap file, or from sniffing packets on a live network interface (with appropriate privileges, as required by the operating system and network interface).

For each one, it stores it in a ring buffer. This is an example -- certainly more complex processing of each packet could be performed, but this is a straightforward thing to understand, write, and test, as an example.

It also listens for incoming TCP connections that can accept commands from the client process, e.g. to read-and-clear the current ring buffer.

Future work

This is my first serious attempt at writing a small but useful program in the Go programming language, so it may violate some things that are considered good or safe practices for writing production-quality Go programs.

Examples of things that could stand more investigation, and perhaps lead to modifications to the program:

• The go feedDelayedChannel() call in package pktsource can, I believe, leak that goroutine, if the code reading from the channel stops doing so before packets have all been read. See section "Always Clean Up Your Goroutines" in Chapter 12 "Concurrency in Go" in the book "Learning Go" by Jon Bodner.