Wireshark-users: Re: [Wireshark-users] Wireshark for Beacon Sniffing

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:10:08 -0800

On Jan 21, 2009, at 4:47 PM, Johne Cookcely wrote:

Hi! OmniPeek was on Windows xpsp2, Wireshark is on Linux ubuntu8.04.

"Same location, same channel, same card" doesn't necessarily imply "same experience", as there's a bunch of software in the way.

In particular, the capture code path for Wireshark-on-Linux might drop more packets than the capture code path for OmniPeek-on-Windows.

When you stop the capture, the status bar (if it's displayed) should show

	Packets: {N} Displayed: {N} Marked: 0 Dropped: {M}

for some values of N and M. If M isn't zero, some packets were dropped because the capture code path wasn't fast enough to capture them and save them to disk; 293149 beacons/hour is about 81 beacons/ second, so I could imagine packets getting dropped. How many are getting dropped?

(Ubuntu 8.04 should have a recent enough libpcap that it will report how many packets were dropped by the Linux capture mechanism because they weren't getting processed fast enough, so Wireshark should be able to report a count of dropped packets.)