Monitoring; Packet Sniffing; Description; Configuring Packet Sniffing - Avaya G350 Maintenance Manual

7

Monitoring

The Avaya G350 Media Gateway provides several software tools for monitoring and diagnosing your
network. Use these tools to monitor the status of your network operations, and to analyze the flow of
information. The tools you can use for monitoring include:
•
The packet sniffing service
•
The extended keepalive mechanism

Packet sniffing

Description

The packet sniffing service allows you to analyze packets that pass through the G350's interfaces.
Packets are captured to a buffer based on criteria that you specify. The buffer is then uploaded via FTP to
a file that can be analyzed using the industry standard Ethereal analysis tool.
The packet sniffing service on the G350 offers several advantages to the network administrator. Since the
capture file is saved in the libpcap format, it is readable both by the S8300's t-ethereal software, and
industry standard versions of Ethereal for Unix, Windows, and Linux (see http://www.ethereal.com).
In addition, the G350's packet sniffing service is capable of capturing non-Ethernet packets, such as
frame-relay and PPP. Non-Ethernet packets are wrapped in a dummy Ethernet header to allow them to be
viewed in a libpcap format. Thus, the G350 allows you to analyze packets on all the interfaces of the
device.
The G350's packet sniffing service gives you full control over the memory usage of the sniffer. You can
set a maximum limit for the capture buffer size, configure a circular buffer so that older information is
overwritten when the buffer fills up, and specify a maximum number of bytes to capture for each packet.

Configuring packet sniffing

You configure packet sniffing using the following steps:
•
Enable packet sniffing.
•
Create a capture list identifying packets to be captured.
•
Configure packet sniffing settings.
•
Start the packet sniffing service.
Maintenance of the Avaya G350 Media Gateway
June 2004
Monitoring
Packet sniffing
277