Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Capturing FC Traffic

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From: Ian Schorr <ethereal@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 16:38:03 -0500
Hi Bimal,

Ethereal cannot capture native Fibre Channel traffic.

However, there may be other options.

If you're using Cisco's SAN equipment, including their MDS series, you can use their fctrace or fibre channel SPAN (or RSPAN) features to generate captures that Ethereal can understand. There was a limitation in earlier codes that I'm not sure was lifted in their 2.0 code, where the saved FC frame (plus the faux header that gets slapped on the front) could not be larger than the size of a regular Ethernet frame, 1514 bytes, so it's very possible that the last 500 bytes or so of a FC frame would get dropped.

I thought at one point I'd found some device that would actually take FC traffic and encapsulate it in Ethernet, spitting it out another port, in a way that Ethereal could read (and that any Ethernet packet capture device could record). Seems to me that it was around $1000, though I'm having troubles finding any information at all. Let me see what I can dig up...

Ian

On Nov 3, 2004, at 7:53 PM, bg wrote:

Hi All

Are there plans for feature to capture FC/HBA Traffic through ethereal? Can it be done right now w/ ethereal? If not, what other options one has to capture info from server side for FC traffic w/o buying expensive Fabric Analyzer?

Regards,
 Bimal
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