Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] newbie Help

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From: Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 09 Apr 2005 14:12:15 +0200
rupesh gautam wrote:

>  
> I asked earlier "Is it true that ethereal doesn't capture all wlan
> packets"...i didn't get answer that could help me.......
>
> This is problem description:-
>
> When i send data (lets say 100Mb data) using wlan by ftp protocol.....
> and capture wlan by ethereal....then by calculating data size from
> data sent by tcp protocol between my laptop and destination(where i
> sent data) as shown by ethereal capture file is much less than
> 100Mb(actual transfer size).
>
> why this diffrence come...is it really missing some packets....and how
> can we improve that....
>
You might look at the drop packet count in Statistics/Summary directly
after doing the capture.

If this value is more than zero it told you that some packets was
detected but missed while capturing, if it *is* zero than it's only
value is "captured all packets" OR "the hardware simply doesn't detect
such things" so it's not really reliable.

There's not a lot things you can do about it, see
http://wiki.ethereal.com/Performance for a summary.

Regards, ULFL