Hi,
I was wondering about Bro's packet sorter. From a quick glance it appears that it's only enabled if packet_sort_window is set to a non zero value. When enabled it will sort packets
a) based on timestamps and
b) for TCP packets based on SEQ/ACK numbers (I presume to ensure that
ACKs are delivered after the data packet)
Note, this is independent from Bro's ability to process multiple trace files (or multiple interfaces) in order. So I was wondering about the use cases for PacketSorter, especially (a)
If the packet sorter is enabled Bro's behavior will slightly change: It won't pass ARP packets to the ARP analyzer, and it won't create a weird if it's not an IP packet.
I was just wondering whether anybody has recently used the packet sorter. If not I'm wondering whether we should test this code path to see whether it works correctly esp wrt IPv6.
Or, actually, whether the packet sorter is worth keeping or whether we should remove the code.
And another question would be if the TCP sorting would better be handled by the TCP analyzer?
Opinions?
cu
Gregor