Network Troubleshooting :: essays research papers

IntroductionIf youve ever been a network administrator, the call you d consume the most might be one you receive in the mettle of the night by some panicked employee stating that a portion of your critical network has gone down. What troubleshooting options atomic number 18 available to provide answers to your network problem? in like manner having a proactive helpdesk that can read the mind of your network, an important part of troubleshooting involves using a network protocol analyzer. If youve done your research, you realize that in that respect ar many choices on the market today that may satisfy your needs but make a dent your companys discharge book. Plus, you have to factor in training your helpdesk on how to hold this new tool and if it will provide some type of return on investment (ROI). After conducting a thorough research of tools to analyze and troubleshoot a network, we decided to use Ethereal. Many versions such a Sniffer Portable by intercommunicate General a nd Observer by Network Instruments provided more options but were only available in demo versions and didnt provide full functionality. Since we wanted to use Tcpdump as one of the tools in our network troubleshooting arsenal, it made sense to run Ethereal since it supports this type of filter. So, what is Ethereal?Ethereal is a network analyzer. It has the ability to read packets from a network, decipher them, and then display the results with a very intuitive GUI. According to the book Ethereal Packet Sniffing, the most important aspects of Ethereal are as follows that it is open source, actively maintained, and free. After conducting thorough research, Ethereal also supports TcpDump format capture filters, supports over 700 protocols (new ones are added on a prescribed basis), and the tool can capture data from Ethernet, Token Ring, 802.11 Wireless, etc. For anyone interested in a command line interface (CLI) interface for Ethereal, youre in luck since there is a CLI available c alled tethereal. History of EtherealEthereal is a fairly mature networking tool that was developed by Gerald Combs back off in 1997, but has only been available to users since 1998. Something unique to this tool is the numerous dissectors that are available. If youre like me, you may ask yourself, what are dissectors? According to Brockmeier, they are what allow Ethereal to decode individual protocols and present them in readable format. Since the code is open source, you will notice every few months that the hark of supported protocols has increased due to individual contributions to Ethereal.