One’s understanding of network protocols can often be Studied extensively in Chapter 5 of the textbook, and in the class labs.

Name’s origin comes from the Ethernet protocol, a link-level protocol that is Incidentally, some people pronounce the nameĮthereal as “ether-real,” while others pronounce it “e-thir-E-al,” as in theĮnglish word ethereal, which means ghostly or insubstantial. Wireshark Packet Sniffer and Packet CaptureĪs noted on the corresponding SourceForge site, theĮthereal development team switched names from Ethereal to Wireshark in May 2006įor more details on this).Slides and handouts posted on the course Web site.Thurday March 4, 2009, at the beginning of class. The difference between a dumb switch and a smart switch is that the smart switch may provide features that allow you to send traffic to the switch and to have the switch do something other than just re-broadcasting traffic, like allowing you to configure the switch to enable a 'port mirroring' feature.Instructor: Jean-Claude Franchitti Session: 'Port mirroring' may be the name that is often given to a feature implemented by a 'smart switch' (also known as a 'managed switch'). (The phrase 'dumb switch' is also sometimes called an 'unmanaged switch'.) They typically improve network efficiency by only sending network traffic out the ports they need. (An example could be to simply save a copy of packets that weren't necessarily being sent to you.)Ī hub receives network traffic and essentially re-broadcasts a copy of whatever it received on all ports.Īs technology improved, 'dumb switches' became more common. Network sniffing refers to the concept of paying attention to the packet's contents. Port mirroring refers to the concept of duplication traffic.

Port mirroring allows you to do network sniffing.

Wireshark packet sniffer