

Wireshark is very smart and will try to interpret the network traffic so you get a clearer view at the protocol. Unless you are debugging your switch environment you can safely ignore all the lower layers (that are shown as the first lines) and expand (click on the ‘+’) the HTTP protocol. The layers correspond to the OSI model and are used to transport the packet. Click on a packet that you like to inspect deeper and you will be shown the protocol stack in the lower left corner. In the top window you will see one line for each packet. You will be shown what has happened when. Then start wireshark and load the file (or just run wireshark dumpfile). Now copy this dump file over to a workstation where you have X11 running – scp should do it. When you are done, just stop the process (Ctrl-C) and you have the raw data in the dump file. Run this command and let it run while you want to record network activity. That will mainly record traffic on the interface eth0, write the output (in raw format) to the file named dump, record the whole packet (65535 bytes maximum) instead of just a few bytes and use the filter expression host web01 and port 80 to just listen to traffic for the server called web01 and listen only to traffic on the HTTP port (80). But most of the time the call is rather simple. Don’t panic – you can still analyze the traffic. However often you need to record traffic that is running on a machine you can just login through SSH. If you have an X11 running on the host in question you may just start Wireshark and start recording the traffic. Then it is time to use the power of tcpdump and Wireshark to get a deeper look on what is actually happening on the wire. And the log files do not help you either. Sometimes a network service is just not behaving the way it should.
