Greetings-
I previously posted on the Devshed forums but haven't received any response. Hopefully the wireshark community might be able to help...
I wrote a perl program which
acts as a network sniffer, intercepting data sent to a networked laser printer. The resulting data, once
parsed, is formatted and written to a serial port which has connected a
series of scrolling LED signboards. I've recently been experiencing some
issues with my network traffic and I was hoping to get some advice on
how to proceed.
I'm running Windows XP connected to a 10Mbps wired
LAN which is part of a larger VPN. I've been using wireshark in my
effort to better understand my recent network issues.
The following scenario was an attempt to send data to our networked
laser printer. I was able to capture the
corresponding network traffic with wireshark. I've attached a snapshot
of the wireshark traffic.
My first question, which I'm under the assumption is out of my control,
has to do with the 5 repeated SYN packets, despite the SYN, ACK that was
sent immediately following the first SYN. I'm thinking maybe the sender
failed to receive the SYN, ACK and as a result resent the SYN packet??
That being the case, why is the receiver replying with repeated ACK
instead of SYN, ACK?
My next question has to do with the timeframe between each of the
following SYN packets. It would appear that the time doubles after each sent SYN packet.
Given the precision of the time intervals I would assume it has
something to do with the retransmission timer or persistence timer,
although I'm curious as to why the interval doubles after each attempt.
Information sent to our networked printer is time sensitive, and as you
can see from the timestamps shown throughout the network traffic it
takes almost 3 minutes to successfully transmit the data.
My questions are:
1- Is there anything I can do to prevent the redundant SYN attempts in
the future?
2- Is there a way to decrease the timeout so that in the event of future
occurrences, the interval between SYN attempts is expedited?
3- In the event data loss is suspected due to network
congestion or quality, are there any diagnostics I could perform to
identify bottlenecks?
Below is a link to a wireshark screenshot showing the packets within the message. It being my first time posing to the list, I'm not sure if I'm permitted to include attachments, so the screenshot is a link to the devshed post attachment. If it would be helpful and I'm permitted I'd be happy to attach the wireshark pcap dump file.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks-
Jeff Bruns