Sniff and record VoIP calls with VoIPong

voipong_20070528.jpg

VoIPong is a VoIP network sniffer that allows you to capture and record any VoIP call that crosses your network. From the VoIPong home page:

VoIPong is a utility which detects all Voice Over IP calls on a pipeline, and for those which are G711 encoded, dumps actual conversation to seperate wave files. It supports SIP, H323, Cisco's Skinny Client Protocol, RTP and RTCP.

There's a server daemon that sets your network adapter to promiscuous mode and watches for VoIP calls. Calls are automatically logged and the G.711 encoded conversations will be named by date and dumped in wav format to an output directory (sox is required to make this work). There's also a handy monitoring tool that will allow you to see what conversations are currently being monitored.

I tried it out this evening and it really works, recording both ends of the conversation to a WAV file. This could be a really handy tool for recording podcasts from a VoIP client that doesn't have a recording feature (Netmeeting, for example). You'll probably need to tweak mic levels on both ends, or one end of the conversation will sound louder than the other.

OS X Users: I was able to get VoIPong compiled for OS X by using the included Makefile.bsd. There is a compilation error at the end, however, due to gcc in OS X not supporting the -shared option. You can get around this by compiling and linking the two .so files manually:
Compiling the shared libs in OS X

# cc -fPIC -g -Wall -Iinclude -c modvocoder_pcma.c
# libtool -lc -dynamic -o modvocoder_pcma.so modvocoder_pcma.o
# cc -fPIC -g -Wall -Iinclude -c modvocoder_pcmu.c
# libtool -lc -dynamic -o modvocoder_pcmu.so modvocoder_pcmu.o

Give it a shot, and if you have any other cool ideas for how this could be used, let us know in the comments!

VoIPong: Voice over IP sniffer and call detector - Link


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Comments

Oldest comments listed first.

Posted by: Anonymous on December 10, 2007 at 12:55 PM

This is a great hack for so many reasons, namely that it is FREE (not to mention useful). I have looked into nearly every OS X solution for capturing VoIP audio packets, and I haven't been impressed by any of them (especially Arcosoft's VONaLink products - they are the most poor looking applications I have ever encountered on a Mac!). However, I have a slight problem:

I am running 10.5.1, and have already installed sox without a hitch. As expected, I encountered a compilation error. However, I am a novice at command line compiling, and I am unsure exactly what you mean by:

You can get around this by compiling and linking the two .so files manually:
Compiling the shared libs in OS X
# cc -fPIC -g -Wall -Iinclude -c modvocoder_pcma.c
# libtool -lc -dynamic -o modvocoder_pcma.so modvocoder_pcma.o
# cc -fPIC -g -Wall -Iinclude -c modvocoder_pcmu.c
# libtool -lc -dynamic -o modvocoder_pcmu.so modvocoder_pcmu.o

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.


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