Posts Tagged With ‘TAP’

1. The Network Capture Playbook Part 5 – Network TAP Basics

   Most network captures are recorded using SPAN ports, as we’ve seen in the previous part of this series. Now that we know what SPAN is all about, it’s time to find out what TAPs are all about, and why you would want (or need) to use them in network capture. TAP is an acronym for […]

2. Frame bytes vs. frame file headers

   When capturing frames from a network there is more information recorded into the capture file than just the bytes of each frame. If you have ever looked at the PCAP or PCAPng file format specifications you have seen that each frame has an additional frame header containing important information that wasn’t part of the frame […]

3. Working with multi-point captures

   Every now and then most analysts run into a troubleshooting situations where they need to capture the same packets at different locations in the network. Some reasons for such multi-point captures include having to determine if packets get delayed at some point in the network (this would be one of the few cases where “it […]

4. Diagnosing intermittent “network” problems

   There’s that one thing that customers usually ask, and that question is if I would be able to help diagnosing a problem on the network. My answer has two parts: If we can capture the problem situation in packets, I will find it When I find it, I’ll tell you if it’s a network problem […]

5. A look at a portable USB3 network TAP

   A while ago I wrote a post for LoveMyTool about how I managed to power my Garland Gigabit TAP with a USB cable, which got me into a discussion about the ProfiTap USB3 device on Linkedin. I had used 100Mbit USB2 ProfiTap devices before and had some issues with it on Linux, so I was […]