Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] (no subject)

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 10:45:36 -0800
Stefan Frutig wrote:

I read that you can`t sniff packets which have a VLAN Tag, because they are
longer then normal packets. Is that true?

If by "longer than normal packets" you mean if 1500 bytes of payload are transmitted on a VLAN, the 14 bytes of Ethernet header plus 4 bytes of VLAN header plus 4 bytes of CRC are longer than the 1518-byte maximum Ethernet packet, and some Ethernet cards will reject those as being too long and not receive them, that might be true - but it's not necessarily true; I have a capture (I don't know where it came from, so I don't know what OS captured it, or what network adapter was used to capture it; somebody might've sent it to the Ethereal mailing list at some point) with 1518-byte Ethernet packets in it (1518 bytes *without* the CRC, so that'd have been 1522 with the CRC), with 14 bytes of Ethernet header, 4 bytes of VLAN header, and 1500 bytes of payload.

There are other potential problems with VLAN captures:

	http://www.ethereal.com/faq.html#q5.36