Network traffic capture in AKS Windows Nodes

Ovidiu Borlean
2 min readNov 26, 2022

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Getting Windows Pods Network Capture is usually a multi-step process. You need to connect to Node, install or run the necessary tools to accomplish this task, get the results through a Storage Account or kubectl cp. Using this script, all these steps are automated, you only need to download the results of your computer.

This script will deploy a manifest file with a privileged container on a Windows node and deploy the tcpdump.exe and azcopy.exe. We need followings:

  • kubectl binary connected to an active AKS cluster
  • SAS Key of a Blob Container with Write permission in order to upload the file. This will be exposed as an environment variable SAS, eg. export SAS=”YourStorageAccountSAS-Key”

Copy/Paste the content of the script on your environment (bash), make it executable with

chmod +x ./kubectl-windumps
kubectl windumps akswin00001 60

where 60 represents the number of seconds of capture.

#!/bin/bash

if [ "$#" -lt 2 ];
then
echo "Windows Nodes Network Capture"
echo "Invalid number of arguments"
echo "Usage: kubectl windumps nodeName captureTime(s)"
echo "kubectl-windumps.sh akswin0001 30"

fi
nodeName="$1"
capTime="$2"

#Checking for existence of SAS Key as environment variable in SAS
if [[ -z "${SAS}" ]]; then
echo "Storage Account Signature not found in environment variable. Please add the required value in SAS, eg. 'SAS=yourKey'"
nodeName="$1"
capTime="$2"
SAS_key="$3"
exit
else
cat << EOF > ./windumps.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
creationTimestamp: null
labels:
run: windows-debug-17263
name: windows-debug-17263
namespace: default
spec:
nodeName: $1
containers:
- image: ghcr.io/jsturtevant/windows-debug:v1.0.0
imagePullPolicy: Always
name: windows-debug-17263
resources: {}
volumeMounts:
- mountPath: /tmp
name: logs
command:
- powershell
- Invoke-Webrequest https://www.microolap.com/downloads/tcpdump/tcpdump_trial_license.zip -useBasicParsing -OutFile C:\tmp\tcpdump.zip;
- Invoke-WebRequest -UseBasicParsing https://aka.ms/downloadazcopy-v10-windows -OutFile c:\tmp\azcopy.zip;
- Expand-Archive C:\tmp\tcpdump.zip -DestinationPath C:\tmp\;
- Expand-Archive c:\tmp\azcopy.zip -DestinationPath C:\tmp\;
- c:\tmp\tcpdump -G $2 -W 1 -w c:\tmp\\$nodeName.pcap;
- cd C:\tmp\azcopy*;
- ./azcopy.exe copy "C:\tmp\\$nodeName.pcap" "$SAS";
- sleep 3600
volumes:
- name: logs
hostPath:
path: /tmp
type: Directory
dnsPolicy: ClusterFirst
hostNetwork: true
nodeSelector:
kubernetes.io/os: windows
restartPolicy: Never
securityContext:
windowsOptions:
hostProcess: true
runAsUserName: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
status: {}
EOF
echo "You can extract the capture file with the following command at the end of the tests: kubectl cp default/windows-debug-17263:/tmp/$nodeName.pcap ./$nodeName.pcap"

kubectl apply -f ./windumps.yaml

#kubectl cp default/windows-debug-17263:/tmp/akswinx000000.pcap ./akswinx000000.pcap


fi

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/OvidiuBorlean/kubectl-windumps

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