Archive for the ‘TCP Analysis’ category

  1. Analyzing a failed TLS connection

    Summary This post demonstrates how to correlate two or more trace files to analyze a broken connection. We identify the root cause and gather information about the network topology. Tracefiles are available at http://www.packet-foo.com/blog/TLS/Skype.zip We assume that the reader is familiar with TCP basics like session setup, retransmissions, window size etc.
  2. SMB System Error 384

    This blog post highlights a very specific detail of Microsoft’s implementation of SMB. It might help those, who try to get rid of SMB version 1 and support staff dealing with inaccessible file shares.
  3. System Error 58 – Wireshark to the rescue

    The other day I was called to investigate a problem where a user could no longer mount a share. The client was running Windows 7. The user got the somewhat obscure message “System error 58 occurred”.
  4. Trace File Case Files: SMB2 Performance

    We had an interesting question regarding SMB2 performance on the Wireshark Q&A forum recently. Upon request the person asking the question was able to add a couple of trace files (=”capture” files).  The question and a link to the traces can be found here: https://ask.wireshark.org/questions/55972/slow-writes-even-slower-reads-spanning-wan-to-netapp Since the question nicely fits into the scope my talk […]
  5. Megalodon challenge solution

    During Sharkfest 2015 I put up a challenge that was different from the usual challenges offered. The pcap files are a lot bigger, the task to solve less specific, and the answer not a simple “easy to verify” answer. I promised to put up my solution a few months after posting the challenge to this […]
  6. Port Numbers reused

    Sharkfest 2015 is coming up fast (22 days, 12 hours to go when typing this), and so I spend the morning hours of my Saturday for preparation of materials for my three talks. Since that also involves adding features and fixing bugs in TraceWrangler (which I also need for the large demo part of my […]
  7. TCP Analysis and the Five-Tuple

    The TCP expert of Wireshark is doing a pretty good job at pinpointing problems, helping analysts to find the packets where things go wrong. Unfortunately, there are some things that can throw the expert off pretty badly, which can fool inexperienced analysts in believing that there are big problems on the network. I did a […]
  8. Advanced display filtering

    Wireshark has a lot of display filters, and the filtering engine is really powerful. You can filter on almost anything in a packet, and ever since the filter box started suggesting possible filter expressions it got really easy to find the one you wanted.
  9. Determining network protocols

    If you spent enough time using Wireshark or any other network analysis tool, you’ll sooner or later be able to even read bare hex dumps of packets, at least partially (it’s a little bit like Neo seeing the Matrix). So maybe you run across a text dump of a packet like this one: 0000  00 […]
  10. Determining frame forwarding latency

    In some situations the question arises how much a frame was delayed by a device it has to pass through, e.g. firewalls, loadbalancers and sometimes even routers and switches. Usually, novice network analysts think that for that you need to synchronize the clocks of the capture PCs down to microseconds or even better, but that […]