dnsmeter

dnsmeter is a tool for testing performance of a nameserver and the infrastructure around it. It generates DNS queries and sends them via UDP to a target nameserver and counts the answers.

Features:

payload can be given as a text file or a PCAP file
can automatically run different load steps, which can be given as a list or ranges
results per load step can be stored in a CSV file
sender addresses can be spoofed from a given network or from the addresses found in the PCAP file
answers are counted, even if source address is spoofed, if answers get routed back to the load generator
round-trip-times are measured (average, min, mix)
the amount of DNSSEC queries can be given as percentage of total traffic
optimized for high amount of packets, on an Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2430 v2 @ 2.50GHz it can generate more than 900.000 packets per second
runs on Linux and FreeBSD

NOTE:

Only IPv4 is support

Dependencies

dnsmeter requires a couple of libraries beside a normal C++ compiling environment with autoconf, automake and libtool.

dnsmeter has a non-optional dependency on the PCRE library, libresolv and PCAP library.

dnsmeter also includes pplib, collection of C++ functions and classes, and it has non-optional dependency on OpenSSL, bzip2, IDN2 (or IDN1) library and zlib.

To install the dependencies under Debian/Ubuntu:

apt-get install -y libssl-dev libbz2-dev libidn2-dev zlib1g-dev libpcap-dev libpcre3-dev gettext

NOTE: If your system does not have libidn2-dev, please use libidn11-dev instead.

To install the dependencies under CentOS (with EPEL enabled):

yum install -y openssl-devel bzip2-devel libidn2-devel zlib-devel libpcap-devel pcre-devel gettext-devel

NOTE: If your using openSUSE/SLE then bzip2's package is libbz2-devel.

To install the dependencies under FreeBSD 10+ using pkg:

pkg install -y openssl libidn2 libpcap pcre gettext

Building from source tarball

The source tarball from DNS-OARC comes prepared with configure:

tar zxvf dnsmeter-version.tar.gz
cd dnsmeter-version
./configure [options]
make
make install

NOTE: If building fails on FreeBSD, try adding these configure options: --with-extra-cflags="-I /usr/local/include" --with-extra-ldflags="-L/usr/local/lib".

Building from Git repository

If you are building dnsmeter from it's Git repository you will first need to initiate the Git submodules that exists and later create autoconf/automake files, this will require a build environment with autoconf, automake and libtool to be installed.

git clone https://github.com/DNS-OARC/dnsmeter.git
cd dnsmeter
git submodule update --init
./autogen.sh
./configure [options]
make
make install

Usage

Once installed please see man dnsmeter for usage.

Example

Lets assume the following scenario:

load generator runs on FreeBSD
network interface an which the traffic goes out and comes back is igb0
source IP on the load generator is 192.168.155.20
target nameserver has IP 192.168.0.1, port 53
we want to spoof the sender address from the network 10.0.0.0/8
the payload file is found here: /home/testdata/payload.txt
the nameserver is running on CentOS and we need to set a route back to the load generator: ip route add 10.0.0.0/8 via 192.168.155.20
we want to test the following load steps: 30000,40000,45000,50000,100000,150000
results should be written to results.csv
DNSSEC rate should be 70%

This makes the following command:

dnsmeter -p /home/testdata/payload.txt \
  -r 30000,40000,45000,50000,100000,150000 \
  -s 10.0.0.0/8 \
  -z 192.168.0.1:53 \
  -e igb0 \
  -d 70 \
  -c results.csv

In the second example, we want to use a PCAP file as payload and want to spoof with the addresses from that file:

dnsmeter -p /home/testdata/pcap.file1 \
  -r 30000,40000,45000,50000,100000,150000 \
  -s pcap \
  -z 192.168.0.1:53 \
  -e igb0 \
  -c results_pcap.csv

Author(s)

Patrick Fedick @pfedick

Contributor(s)

Jerry Lundström @jelu

Copyright

This file is part of dnsmeter.

dnsmeter is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

dnsmeter is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with dnsmeter.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

jeffbean/dnsmeter