A quick post because I can't resist the "sniffing" joke.

If you do a lot of network traffic analysis, you've probably used wireshark, tcpdump, and other tools of that nature. However, they only work well for network traffic - try to use Unix domain sockets and you're out of luck - they don't understand them.

Unless you proxy the traffic. Like so:

First, let the process open whatever socket you care about.

Then, move it out of the way and have socat listen in its stead:

mv DEFAULT.socket hidden.socket
socat UDP-LISTEN:6000,reuseaddr,fork UNIX-CONNECT:hidden.socket

This sets up socat to take anything from UDP port 6000 and apply it to the (now hidden) socket, with it none the wiser.

Then we plug tcpdump in to listen on this port:

tcpdump -ni lo -s0 -f 'udp port 6000' -w /tmp/out.pcap

And set up the proxy entry where the socket was expecting to be:

socat UNIX-LISTEN:DEFAULT.socket,fork UDP-CONNECT:127.0.0.1:6000