Networks

I was happily building some code to filter and manage traffic in Open vSwitch via C++ communicating via the OpenFlow interface. Then, ... well, I realized I was missing some things. In OVS's documentation, much of it uses the command line tools to inject the rules. Some of those examples show automatic mac swaps and such. hmm, Nicera extensions but not in the openflow specification. Which means changing code to interface to other api bind points of OVS.

I had also written some code to interface to the OVSDB so I could list interfaces, detect changes, and obtain statistics.

In stepping back and thinking about this, I came across a youtube video on youtube:

which talks about Stratum and Next-Gen SDN. I wasn't so interested in the Stratum concept in as much as I was interested in the p4.org concept of writing code to filter packets.

From a Linux network stack perspective, a little closer to home, there is eBGP and XDP. The best diagram I've seen of XDP and eBGP hook points is on page 3 of The eXpress Data Path: Fast Programmable Packet Processing inthe Operating System Kernel which was presented at 2018 SigComm CoNEXT Conference. As an aside, another interesting paper there is " Leveraging eBPF for programmable network functions with IPv6 Segment Routing".

Other references:

• BPF and XDP Reference Guide
• BPF Compiler Collection (BCC)
• Linux Plumbers Conference 2018 BPF Microconference
• Linux Plumbers Conference 2018 Networking Track
• Linux Bridge, l2-overlays, E-VPN!
• Scaling bridge forwarding database
• Lifetime of BPF objects
• P4-16 Language Specification
• net: add bpfilter
• AF_XDP
• Linux Network Programming with P4
• bpf - perform a command on an extended BPF map or program
• BPF - BPF programmable classifier and actions for ingress/egress queueing disciplines
• 7 tools for analyzing performance in Linux with bcc/BPF

In Debian with Kernel "4.19.0-1-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.19.12-1 (2018-12-22)", the following are set:

# grep -i bpf /boot/config-4.19.0-1-amd64
CONFIG_CGROUP_BPF=y
CONFIG_BPF=y
CONFIG_BPF_SYSCALL=y
# CONFIG_BPF_JIT_ALWAYS_ON is not set
CONFIG_IPV6_SEG6_BPF=y
CONFIG_NETFILTER_XT_MATCH_BPF=m
# CONFIG_BPFILTER is not set
CONFIG_NET_CLS_BPF=m
CONFIG_NET_ACT_BPF=m
CONFIG_BPF_JIT=y
# CONFIG_BPF_STREAM_PARSER is not set
CONFIG_LWTUNNEL_BPF=y
CONFIG_HAVE_EBPF_JIT=y
CONFIG_BPF_EVENTS=y
# CONFIG_BPF_KPROBE_OVERRIDE is not set
CONFIG_TEST_BPF=m
# grep -i xdp /boot/config-4.19.0-1-amd64
# CONFIG_XDP_SOCKETS is not set

Install the the BPF Compiler Tools with:

apt install libbpfcc libbpfcc-dev bpfcc-tools python-bpfcc

bcc header files are in '/usr/include/bcc/'. Many tools with suffic 'bpfcc' are installed in /usr/sbin. There is a man page for each. Many many examples can be found in /usr/share/doc/bpfcc-tools/examples/doc/.

7 tools for analyzing performance in Linux with bcc/BPF covers execsnoop, opensnoop, xfsslower, biolatency, tcplife, gethostlatency and trace. The article also refers to bcc Python Developer Tutorial. Also referenced was bpftrace. A better page referencing these tools is Linux Extended BPF (eBPF) Tracing Tools. eBPF: One Small Step is an early Brendan Gregg article on eBPF tracing.

Going even deeper into the woods, another tool referenced includes SystemTap which has a Debian Package.

The BCC has a reference guide. Most of the preceding has to do with tracing. Now to get to packet manipulation.

For compiling, some packages:

apt install clang llvm clang-7-doc ncurses-doc libomp-7-doc llvm-7-doc

Some items from Making the Kernel’s Networking Data Path Programmable with BPF and XDP:

• 11 64bit registers, 32bit subregisters, up to 512bytes stack
• Instructions 64bit wide, max 4096 per program
• BPF calling convention for helpers allows for efficient mapping: a) R0 →return value from helper call, b) R1 - R5 →argument registers for helper call, c) R6 - R9 → callee saved, preserved on helper call
• /proc/kallsyms exposure of JIT image as symbol for stack traces
• Since LLVM 3.7: clang -O2 -target bpf -c foo.c -o foo.o
• To show ability: llc --version | grep bpf
• Assembler output through -S supported
• llvm-objdump for disassembler and code annotations (via DWARF)
• C example walkthrough: tools/testing/selftests/bpf/testl_4lb.c
• when attaching to generic XDP kernel driver via iproute2: ip link set dev eno1 xdpgeneric obj prog.o

2019/05/04 - Hacker News had a reference to CloudFlare where they discussed eBPF can't count?! - an article with references on how to debug eBPF code.

In building an openflow controller, the controller needs to perform some packet interception, inspection, and modification activities. This is easy from a UDP perspective. But when the openflow engine forwards the complete packet, mac addresses and all, the packets need to be decoded. And for TCP, there are various connection oriented states which need to be taken in to account when trying to perform deep packet inspection.

This means creating a purpose built TCP stack to perform the state management, or someone make use of existing tools to perform the state management. In my searches, I came across:

• chobits/tapip - a user-mode TCP/IP stack based on linux tap device - with a basic state machine - but I don't need the tun/tap integration as I already have the buffered inbound and outbound raw packets.
• tass-belgium/picotcp - PicoTCP is a free TCP/IP stack implementation - this is better as it has an api for providing timers and packet-in/packet-out flows. Documentation looks good.
• hacker's userspace TCP/IP stack with a five part TCP stack tutorial at www.saminiir.com. It has a simple and self contained state machine.
• lwIP mirror - an embeddable tcp stack with a number of bundled applications.

The book "TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1, 2e" discusses timers extensively, something useful, as I am considering putting in the basic state handling code manually, rather than using one of the above libraries.

I saw a debian bug report Installation was successfully at BananaPi. When initially looking at the Banana Pi, as it has a version with a number of network interfaces, I didn't readily see the tooling necessary for booting images.

The bug report shows that Debian now has native images available, and similar images can be found in the Buster and Sid distributions. There are also Beagle Bone Black images in there.

Random links I picked up for building custom installs:

• Building a pure Debian armhf rootfs - good writeup by Tim Fletcher
• DebianInstallerArmOtherPlatforms - Howto install Debian/armel with a custom kernel - links on the page lead to other excellent articles
• debian debootstrap - from one of the primary contributors to Banana Pi builds
• Banana Pi BPI-R2 Wiki - much updated since I last landed on it
• Searching testing people for hdmi + wifi in Kernel 4.16 - forum entry
• How to build an Ubuntu/Debian SD image from scratch - with some bonding notes
• Banana Pi BPI-R64 - wonder when the release date is

Kind of related, Redhat has a summary article of Introduction to Linux interfaces for virtual networking. Excellent summary of many interface types in Linux.

2019/02/18 From a different direction, via the Debian Bugs list, I've come across Lamobo R1 which is another name for the Banana Pi R1. The page has some additional information, and by cruising to the main page, additional AllWinner SoC info can be obtained.

In addition, Armbian Build on GitHub offers the code for building Arm kernels on these types of boards.

Kernel CI shows results of Kernel Builds on various devices, with an example entry of Kernel 5.0 booting on Banana Pi R2

Sometimes, you just don't know what is on your network. A couple ways of finding out include using nmap or arp-scan.

An easy install:

sudo apt install arp-scan nmap

And an easy use with some basic defaults (the Unknown ones are LXC containers with manual mac addresses, and Cadmus Computer Systems is a VirtualBox device):

$sudo arp-scan --interface=vlan90 --localnet
Interface: vlan90, datalink type: EN10MB (Ethernet)
Starting arp-scan 1.9.5 with 256 hosts (https://github.com/royhills/arp-scan)
10.55.90.1      00:13:3b:0f:59:24       Speed Dragon Multimedia Limited
10.55.90.14     08:00:27:de:fc:9d       Cadmus Computer Systems
10.55.90.21     0a:00:55:90:00:ab       (Unknown)
10.55.90.22     0a:00:55:90:00:0c       (Unknown)
10.55.90.23     0a:00:55:90:00:23       (Unknown)
10.55.90.31     f0:ad:4e:03:64:7f       Globalscale Technologies, Inc.

8 packets received by filter, 0 packets dropped by kernel
Ending arp-scan 1.9.5: 256 hosts scanned in 3.155 seconds (81.14 hosts/sec). 6 responded

With nmap, it knows about the mis-named mac:

$ sudo nmap -sn 10.55.90.0/24
Starting Nmap 7.70 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2018-09-29 20:25 MDT
Nmap scan report for 10.55.90.1
Host is up (0.00032s latency).
MAC Address: 00:13:3B:0F:59:24 (Speed Dragon Multimedia Limited)
Nmap scan report for 10.55.90.14
Host is up (-0.10s latency).
MAC Address: 08:00:27:DE:FC:9D (Oracle VirtualBox virtual NIC)
Nmap scan report for 10.55.90.21
Host is up (-0.100s latency).
MAC Address: 0A:00:55:90:00:AB (Unknown)
Nmap scan report for 10.55.90.22
Host is up (-0.100s latency).
MAC Address: 0A:00:55:90:00:0C (Unknown)
Nmap scan report for 10.55.90.23
Host is up (-0.087s latency).
MAC Address: 0A:00:55:90:00:23 (Unknown)
Nmap scan report for 10.55.90.31
Host is up (0.00074s latency).
MAC Address: F0:AD:4E:03:64:7F (Globalscale Technologies)
Nmap scan report for 10.55.90.10
Host is up.
Nmap done: 256 IP addresses (7 hosts up) scanned in 3.31 seconds

With these specific commands, arp-scan may see things which nmap may not, ie, firewall that are blocking pings. nmap probably has a mode for scanning similarly to arp-scan.

From the iovisor-dev mailing list:

>I am trying to collect IPFIX flow data from the linux host interface.

Why IPFIX and not sFlow or netflow ?

>Can someone guide me the best way to collect the data using XDP.

It depends a bit on you setup. Assuming you want to do this "inline" on the box receiving the traffic. Then you should know/learn, that XDP cannot allocate a new packet (that e.g. could be used sending IPFIX/sFlow info directly). Instead, I would use the perf-ringbuffer to store sampled-packets (via copy), and then code a userspace program that reads from this perf-ringbuffer, and it will communicate with the central IPFIX/sFlow server.

>Any samples for reference will be a great help.

From XDP howto use the perf-ringbuffer via bpf_perf_event_output, samples are avail here:

• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/samples/bpf/xdp_sample_pkts_kern.c
• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/samples/bpf/xdp_sample_pkts_user.c

Notice, there are also plenty of BCC examples using the perf-ringbuffer, look for BCC code with:

   BPF_PERF_OUTPUT(events);
   events.perf_submit(ctx, data, sizeof(struct data_t));

On 06/14/2018 09:22 PM, someone wrote:
> So I have to ask, why is it advantageous to put this in a container 
> rather than just run it directly
> on the container's host? 

Most any host now-a-days has quite a bit of horse power to run services. All those services could be run natively all in one namespace on the same host, or ...

I tend to gravitate towards running services individually in LXC containers. This creates a bit more overhead than running chroot style environments, but less than running full fledged kvm style virtualization for each service.

I typically automate the provisioning and the spool up of the container and its service. This makes it easy to rebuild/update/upgrade/load-balance services individually and enmasse across hosts.

By running BGP within each container, BGP can be used to advertise the loopback address of the service. I go one step further: for certain services I will anycast some addresses into bgp. This provides an easy way to load balance and provide resiliency of like service instances across hosts,

Therefore, by running BGP within the container, and on the host, routes can be distributed across a network with all the policies available within the bgp protocol. I use Free Range Routing, which is a fork of Quagga, to do this. I use the eBGP variant (RFC 7938) for the hosts and containers , which allows for the elimination of the extra overhead of OSPF or similar internal gateway protocol.

Stepping away a bit, this means that BGP is used in a tiered scenario. There is the regular eBGP with the public ASN for handling DFZ-style public traffic. For internal traffic, private eBGP ASNs are used for routing traffic between and within hosts and containers.

With recent improvements to Free Range Routing and the Linux Kernel, various combinations of MPLS, VxLAN, EVPN, and VRF configurations can be used to further segment and compartmentalize traffic within a host, and between containers. It is now very easy to run vlan-less between hosts through various easy to configure encapsulation mechanisms. To be explicit, this relies on and contributes to a resilient layer 3 network between hosts, and eliminates the bothersome layer 2 redundancy headaches with spanning tree and such.

That was a very long winded way to say: keep a very basic host configuration running a minimal set of functional services, and re-factor the functionality and split it across multiple containers to provide easy access to and maintenance of individual services like dns, smtp, database, dashboards, public routing, private routing, firewalling, monitoring, management, ...

There is a higher up-front configuration cost, but over the longer term, if configured via automation tools like Salt or similar, maintenance and security is improved.

It does require a different level of sophistication with operational staff.

Other BGP routing Daemons:

• exabgp - python based
• gobgp - go based
• bird - c based
• bagpipe - python based, in openstack project

Other mailing list comments:

Our use case was both on exporting service IPs as well as receiving routes from ToRs. Exa is more geared towards the former than the latter. Rather then working on getting imports and route installation through Exa, we found it simpler with BIRD exporting the service IP from it bound to a loopback to run local healthchecks on the nodes and then have them yank the service IP from the loopback on failing healthchecks in order to stop exporting.

The intent of the original post was vague. Like a lot of people, I would not run a full BGP router in a container. Now, if the purpose is to inject or learn a handful of routes in order to do limited host routing, I can see the need. A route-server or a looking glass in a container would be fine, or something to perform analysis on the routing table, but not anything that has to route actual traffic.

I use ExaBGP to inject routes, perfect tool for that. If routes have to be received (not my use case) it makes more sense, as stated by previous posts, to use Quagga or BIRD. Which one is better : easy : if you like Cisco better, use Quagga. If you like Juniper better, use BIRD

BIRD looking glass looks very good

When using the BGP module in Free Range Routing, the 'network ' statement can be used in at least a couple of different roles. One generic role is for generating an advertisement for an aggregate prefix, say to an upstream. Even knowing that, one is also tempted to use a network statement to advertise connected prefixes.

The draw back to advertising connected prefixes is that the prefix is advertised even a related interface is not 'up'. This could lead to a blackhole scenario.

A better way to handle the advertisements of connected prefixes is to use the 'redistribute connected' command.

Even with the use of this command, there may be scenarios (which I need to test at some point) where the prefix is advertised or withdrawn depending upon the link state. Free Range Routing has an additional command which could be used to ensure link state checking: 'bgp network import-check'.

There is more about the Linux state checking flags in the Why Link-State Matters presentation from LinuxCon 2015.

In addition, the Free Range Routing developers have brought together some relevant sysctl settings.

This is another collection of random notes, this time, on how to build something on Linux somewhat resembling Cisco's Global Load Balancing capability, basically a continuation of my entry at Linux ifupdown2 VRRP.

Traditionally, one sets up VRRP using keepalived or the simpler vrrpd. This configuration is typically used when setting up (typically) two routers in an active/passive setup to act as a gateway for a network subnet. In essence, the two (or more) routers negotiate who will hold the gateway mac and ip address.

In other circumstances, it might be desired (and possible) to run active/active. This is a possibility when running containers on a host, and there are similar services running across the hosts. In this instance the same address can be assigned as a secondary address across multiple containers to load balance traffic.

And in even other cases, subnets may be stretched in a layer2 over layer3 encapsulated network across multiple hosts. And in this case, each host should be able to act as a gateway for the traffic local to it. It is this last example I am currently investigating.

Reynold's Blog has an entry called Configuring Cumulus Linux High Availability Layer 2 Network. The most interesting aspect of this post is reference to using 'address-virtual' commands when using ifupdown2 style /etc/network/interface structures:

address-virtual 00:00:5e:00:01:02 10.11.2.254/24

The ip and mac addresses are identical across interfaces sharing the gateway role. The mac address is a reserved range 00:00:5e:00:01:00 – 00:00:5e:00:01:ff for VRRP style operations. The ip address is the virtual ip address (VIP). This style of usage is explained more in Virtual Router Redundancy - VRR.

Or maybe I don't worry about this as Ethernet Virtual Private Network - EVPN has a section with asymmetric routing and symmetric routing which do not need vrrp style constructs.

Layer 3 routing on Cumulus Linux MLAG talks about VRR, the address-virtual, and FRR/route-map to obtain ECMP based load balancing. Now the question - how to get things to not need MLAG.

# netstat -rn -f inet
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags   MSS Window  irtt Iface
0.0.0.0         10.7.28.23      0.0.0.0         UG        0 0          0 vlan28
10.7.1.1        10.7.3.7        255.255.255.255 UGH       0 0          0 enp14s0f2
10.7.1.2        10.7.3.4        255.255.255.255 UGH       0 0          0 enp14s0f3
10.7.1.33       10.7.28.23      255.255.255.255 UGH       0 0          0 vlan28
10.7.1.34       10.7.28.23      255.255.255.255 UGH       0 0          0 vlan28
10.7.1.41       10.7.3.7        255.255.255.255 UGH       0 0          0 enp14s0f2
.....

# ls -l /sys/class/net
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Mar  8 04:06 bond0 -> ../../devices/virtual/net/bond0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Mar  8 04:05 bonding_masters
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Mar  8 04:06 enp12s0f0 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.1/0000:0c:00.0/net/enp12s0f0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Mar  8 04:06 enp12s0f1 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.1/0000:0c:00.1/net/enp12s0f1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Mar  8 04:06 enp12s0f2 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.1/0000:0c:00.2/net/enp12s0f2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Mar  8 04:06 enp12s0f3 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.1/0000:0c:00.3/net/enp12s0f3
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Mar  8 04:05 enp14s0f0 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.2/0000:0e:00.0/net/enp14s0f0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Mar  8 04:05 lo -> ../../devices/virtual/net/lo
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Mar  8 04:05 ovsbr0 -> ../../devices/virtual/net/ovsbr0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Mar  8 04:06 ovs-system -> ../../devices/virtual/net/ovs-system
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Mar  8 04:05 vlan19 -> ../../devices/virtual/net/vlan19

# cat /sys/class/net/enp8s0f0/statistics/tx_bytes
308623980

# netstat -rn
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags   MSS Window  irtt Iface
10.9.0.0        10.9.2.32       255.255.255.0   UG        0 0          0 enp1s0
10.9.1.1        10.9.2.32       255.255.255.255 UGH       0 0          0 enp1s0

ss -ntl

# nstat -a
#kernel
IpInReceives                    156764             0.0
IpInDelivers                    156764             0.0
IpOutRequests                   151083             0.0
IpOutNoRoutes                   40                 0.0
.....

• netstat --statistics
• netstat -s -- protocol stats
• netstat -r -- routing info from kernel
• netstat -g -- mulicast info
• netstat -i -- stats
• netstat -ic -- monitor continuously
• netstat -e -- extra information
• netstat -o -- timer related information
• netstat -p -- associated PID
• netstat -l -- listening sockets
• ss --summary

Useful combinations:

• netstat -antp
• netstat -lntp

• nload - console based histogram
• iftop - console based numeric traffic values
• iptraf - An IP traffic monitor that shows information on the IP traffic passing over your network.
• iptraf-ng - is a fork of the original project
• dstat - Combines vmstat, iostat, ifstat, netstat information and more
• sar

Diagnostics
• strace -e open nstat 2>&1 > /dev/null|grep /proc
• strace -e open netstat -s 2>&1 > /dev/null|grep /proc

I was looking through Cumulus ifupdown2 code and came across references to vrrpd and ifplugd. I have been using keepalived before becoming aware of what ifupdown2 can do. I am starting to fathom how things relate 'under the hood'.

Configuring Cumulus Linux High Availability Layer 2 Network – Part 2 introduces vrrp along with 'address-virtual' in the /etc/network/interfaces file:

auto brvlan.10
iface brvlan.10
 address 10.0.10.1/24
 address-virtual 00:00:5e:00:01:01 10.0.10.254/24

The MAC address range is reserved in an RFC, with the last byte adjustable, which now makes sense as to why there could only be 255 vrrp instances. Based upon current thinking, something I need to test, is ifupdown2 sets up ifplugd and vrrpd under the hood to handle migrating the virtual address from interface to interface.

I need to figure out how the configuration above correlates with vrrp specific settings as seen in ifupdown2 vrrpd.py source code.

When evaluating VRRP settings, referring to Configuring, Attacking and Securing VRRP on Linux may be helpful. One useful suggestion for some implementations is to put the virtual address on an untagged interface away from the 'protected' vlans in order to prevent spoofing of the VRRP packets.

Debian packages a very old version of vrrpd. It is best to use a more up-to-date version at fredbcode/Vrrpd

Right up my alley -- someone who is using SaltStack to provision networks. There are some ideas in which I might lift for some of my own work: Building your own sdn with debian linux salt stack and python.

• Netdev 2.1 conference report - an excellent and detailed summary of Netdev 2.1 Conference in Montreal from April 6 to 8 written by Brian Linkletter.
• Interactive map of Linux kernel
• Per-IP rate limiting with iptables -- need to figure out how to do this in nftables
• Using a dummy network interface - “fake” network interface through a module called “dummy”

Because they help decipher the operation of ifupdown2, frr, and other routing tools.

• Interface Configuration and Management
• Ethernet Virtual Private Network - EVPN
• Management VRF
• Virtual Router Redundancy - VRR
• Data Center Host to ToR Architecture
• Power over Ethernet - PoE
• Network Virtualization
• Redistribute Neighbor - uses ifplugd
• Equal Cost Multipath Load Sharing - Hardware ECMP
• Segment Routing
• VLAN-aware Bridge Mode for Large-scale Layer 2 Environments
• Data Center Layer 2 High Availability - validated design
• VXLAN Routing - probably associated with FRR symmetric,asymmetric routing

Third party blogs:

• BGP in EVPN-Based Data Center Fabrics - implies that EVPN with eBGP may not 'work out of the box', but seems to be functioning just fine with my implementation of Linux kernel 4.8/4.14, Free Range Routing 4.0.
• Layer 3 Leaf/Spine Fabric with EVPN / VXLAN control - with a note about using the "Common Spine ASN – Discrete Leaf ASN", with eBGP, which results in inherent ECMP (Equal Cost Multi Path) routing. (made possible with FRRouting as the underlying routing engine).
• VRF for Linux where David Ahearn discusses the rationale for adding VRF to the Linux kernel. There is also an entry about listening on ports in a VRF: "gives users and architects a choice: bind a socket per VRF or use a ‘VRF any’ socket. "
• Ifupdown2: Network Interface Manager slideshare from DebConf16, with a discussion of ifquery, policy manager, vrf, ...
• Using the Linux VRF Solution - comprehensive slide deck by David Ahearn on using VRF in Linux: systemd, iproute2, ifupdown2, ...
• Microservice Networking - Leveraging VRF on the host - another David Ahearn slide deck - discusses the use of /32 addresses in a container

Some links I have come across, but nothing will be easy to do

• open-ethernet/mlag: brings in a number of other libraries, and needs a controller to sync states
• MLAG on Linux - lessons learned, from the folks at Cumulus Networks. I downloaded their Cumulus VX to see about extracting the MLAG tools, but their level of integration is... extensive, and therefore hard to extract into something self contained. A paper to go along with the presentation. And a slide show which goes into excellent detail about how packets transition an MLAG solution, and how to stop duplication.

I found out today, via I, Admin, that the Linux kernel, regardless of whether iptables or nftables is installed or not, is tracking connections. That tends to indicate then, that adding rules via nftables will add very little additional overhead. So firewalling a box adds very little additional overhead.

The state of the connection table can be determined by installing:

sudo apt install conntrack

The -L option will show the current state of the table. The -E allows one to watch connection states as they change.

To watch and to sort the state of connections, use:

sudo apt install iptstate

Traffic bandwidth used via particular tcp sessions can be viewed with

sudo apt install tcptrack

In a nutshell, "state" is determined via the data collected by and rules determined by connection tracking. Connection tracking is mostly just a set of timeouts, thresholds, and verifications that help us determine if a packet is "likely" or, ideally "mostly guaranteed" to be part of a known/expected/established layer 4 session. These timeouts, thresholds, and verifications can be seen by catting the various files in /proc/sys/net/netfilter

But back to connection tracking, ... having made the explicit realization that connection tracking is 'always on', and that iptables and nftables only add rule into that path, it becomes easier to realize that network security becomes a very low overhead endeavor. There are very few reason's for not having an 'always on' security posture.

By running

sudo apt install conntrackd

and creating an appropriate conntrackd.conf file, it is possible to build a synchronized, multi-host, active/active firewall solution with little additional effort. conntrackd is designed to replicate the local connection tracking table to other hosts, and to merge other host's connection tracking tables into the local tables.

2018/01/15: Vincent Bernat, in comments below, indicates that "connection tracking is not automatically done. It is done only if the nf_conntrack and/or nf_conntrack_ipv6 modules are loaded (or builtin). This is usually only done by autoloading through the first iptables command". I will need to check that out to confirm from an installation perspective as well as a packet forwarding speed perspective.