I'm trying to use tcpdump capture traffic on the external interface of my NAT/firewall/web/mail/etc. system in a quasi-private way, specifically by excluding any traffic that comes from or is ultimately destined to NAT'ed boxes. Since packets which go from or to 192.168.2.0/24 are NAT'ed before (and probably after) tcpdump sees them, I don't believe I can accomplish this with a simple "not net 192.168.2.0/24" filter on tcpdump; thus, I've turned to the "rulenum" or "rdr" feature of tcpdump's filter criteria, which works on packets logged by pf(4).

I know that if I simply enable logging on all of the packets I want to see, using pf-based tcpdump filter criteria works like a charm. The problem I have is that doing so will make for a rather gigantic /var/log/pflog very quickly, a situation I'd like to avoid if possible (for disk space and possible performance issues). Thus, my question is: is it possible to enable pf logging without writing to /var/log/pflog, while still preserving tcpdump's ability to see packets on the pflog0 interface? Alternately, is there a better/simpler way to accomplish my tcpdump objective of not logging packets coming from or destined to NAT'ed boxes?

Thanks,
Alex Kirk

Reply via email to