Can TCPDump and TCPReplay be used to record(tcpdump) network traffic coming in to a application server/webserver/queue application etc., and then replayed using the dump on TCPReplay?
Let's say I setup a apache server and use TCPDump to capture the entire network traffic and dump it to a file. Now I run apache in a different machine and want to replay the traffic to this new apache server using the file. How can I achieve this?
I especially want to understand how TCPReplay would work in such a scenario. i.e. how would syn/ack responses work for TCP. How would a new a connection etc. be initiated?
No, you cannot use Tcpreplay to replay traffic to a server. TCP sessions have random sequence numbers, and are fully stateful. Replaying previously recorded TCP traffic will be ignored by a server.