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How to generate PCAP files

posted Jun 26, 2012, 6:20 PM by Mamta Buch

Introduction

Tethereal (http://www.ethereal.com/docs/man-pages/tethereal.1.html) is a network protocol analyzer. It lets you capture packet data from a live network, or read packets from a previously saved capture file, either printing a decoded form of those packets to the standard output or writing the packets to a file. Tethereal's native capture file format is libpcap format, which is also the format used by tcpdump and various other tools. 

Without any options set, Tethereal will work much like tcpdump. It will use the pcap library to capture traffic from the first available network interface and displays a summary line on stdout for each received packet. 

Tethereal is able to detect, read and write the same capture files that are supported by Ethereal. The input file doesn't need a specific filename extension, the file format and an optional gzip compression will be automatically detected. The capture file format section of ethereal(1) or http://www.ethereal.com/docs/man-pages/ethereal.1.html provides a detailed description. 

PLEASE NOTE: The following commands are for Fedora. If using Ubuntu substitute tshark for tethereal.  

Examples

Trace all packet at port 5060 and dump to the stdout.
      
    tethereal port 5060 



Trace all packet at port 1040 or port 540 on eth1 and dump to the stdout.  
      
    tethereal port 1040 or port 540 -i eth1  



Trace all packet at port 5060 and dump details to the stdout.  
      
    tethereal -V port 



Trace all packet at port 5060 for 30s and save to a file called t.pcap in PCAP format.  
      
    tethereal -a duration:10 -w t.pcap port 5060



Trace all packet between <host A> and <host B> for 30s and save to a file called t.pcap in PCAP format.  
      
   tethereal -a duration:30 -w t.pcap host <host A> and host <host B>



Trace on port 5060 in aring buffer, this will keep a max of 20 files swaping to new files at 5 minutes or 50mb 
      
   tethereal port 5060 -w etherealLoop.pcap -b duration:300 -b files:20 -b filesize:50000

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