[asterisk-dev] Using ethereal to diagnose problems

[John Lange]

On Thu, 2006-06-08 at 10:57 -0600, Douglas Garstang wrote:
> I prefer to use ngrep. It's much simpler and shows you the application
> layer traffic only, which when your debugging SIP traffic is all that
> you want to see.

Not necessarily, Layer 2 stuff can often be important. Often there are
network problems which aren't obvious until you put VoIP on the network.
People tolerate bad data networks because they assume thats just the way
it is, but bad voice is a different thing.

I think if you give ethereal a try you'll be amazed at how much more
powerful it is than tools like ngrep.

BTW, it also can capture from multiple interfaces at once though I
thought ngrep could do that? Doesn't ngrep use libpcap?

John

>  What would be sweet though is if there was a network traffic analyser
> that could monitor multiple interfaces at once.
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: John Lange [mailto:john.lange at open-it.ca]
> > Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2006 10:05 AM
> > To: Asterisk Developers Mailing List
> > Subject: [asterisk-dev] Using ethereal to diagnose problems
> > 
> > 
> > Greg Boehnlein's recent post about testing Asterisk with SSIP reminded
> > me that I recently watched a presentation at our local Asterisk users
> > group about using Ethereal to trouble shoot VoIP.
> > 
> > Quite frankly I was blown away by how powerful Ethereal is so 
> > I thought
> > I'd share it here for the few of you who might not already know about
> > it.
> > 
> > Among other things you can grab all the traffic of the 
> > network; select a
> > SIP packet, ask Ethereal to find the complete conversation, do
> > statistical analysis on it (including showing which packets were lost
> > and why), show QOS setting etc. etc. Ethereal's colorizing 
> > also makes it
> > easy to see all kinds of details at a glance.
> > 
> > You can even ask ethereal to save the voice conversation to a 
> > .wav file.
> > 
> > Having just discovered this I'm far from an expert. Does 
> > anyone know of
> > any in-depth tutorials on analyzing VoIP with ethereal so I can make
> > even better use of it?
> > 
> > John
> > 
> > 
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