PlayCap is a packet replay tool that allows users to replay packet capture (PCAP) files by reading the files and sending the captured packets to a selected network interface. It has a graphical user interface and was created by Signal11. To use PlayCap, download the source code, build it using CMake, open a PCAP file, select a network interface, and click "Playback" to replay the packets. Other packet replay tools include those integrated with Wireshark, while sites like the Bro IDS wiki collect packet traces for analysis or replay.

1. Usage Note of
PlayCap
(a packet replay tool)
William.L
wiliwe@gmail.com
2015-02-03

2. Index
What’s Packet Replay?................................................................................................................................... 3
PlayCap............................................................................................................................................................ 4
Download Source Code........................................................................................................................... 4
Build PlayCap.......................................................................................................................................... 4
Use ............................................................................................................................................................ 5
Other Packet Replay Tools............................................................................................................................. 8
Sites Collecting Packet Trace Files................................................................................................................ 9

3. What’s Packet Replay?
To replay the content (packet data) of a given PCAP(packet capture) file(or called (Packet)Trace file) as it
was captured. Also named Packet Playback or Traffic Generation.
PCAP file is created using PCAP library:
* libpcap for Unix / Linux - http://www.tcpdump.org/
* WinPcap for MS Windows - http://www.winpcap.org/
Packet monitoring/capturing tool could save captured packet data as PCAP file.
CLI-based tcpdump
http://www.tcpdump.org/
WireShark (Ethereal)
https://www.wireshark.org/
GUI-based
Microsoft Network Monitor
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=4865

4. PlayCap
PlayCap is a GUI packet replay tool created by Signal11 - http://www.signal11.us/oss/playcap/
GUI is based on Fox Toolkit (http://www.fox-toolkit.org/) which is a cross-platform, C++-based widget toolkit.
Download Source Code
To download PlayCap source code from the site https://github.com/signal11/PlayCap/downloads :
or through Git:
git clone git://github.com/signal11/PlayCap.git
Build PlayCap
PlayCap uses CMake (http://www.cmake.org/) as its build system on Linux and Windows. Build instructions
are located in the README.txt under source folder.
Under terminal, change to PlayCap source folder and run the following commands to build the software:
$ cmake . (the period could be skip, cause to that cmake will find CMakeList.txt in current folder defaultly)

5. $ make
If you meet error messag as below,
please include the header <unistd.h> for Unix/Linux system in the source file "PlaybackWindow.cpp".
$ sudo make install (run as Root role)
Use
1) Run PlayCap executable as Root role(cause to that it needs Root privilege for opening a network interface) to
show PlayCap window(here using generated playcap tool in source folder).

6. 2) Click menu item ”File > Open” to invoke file choosing dialogue window, navigate to the location of PCAP
file want to be played and press OK.
3) Click and it will show a dialogue to select which network interface the packets will be sent to.

7. 4) Press the “Playback” button of the network interface you want, PlayCap will start to read PCAP and send
captured packet to the selected network interface.
Total time
Total number of packets

8. Other Packet Replay Tools
http://wiki.wireshark.org/Tools#Traffic_generators

9. Sites Collecting Packet Trace Files
Bro IDS official site:
https://www.bro.org/community/traces.html