Unified Access Point Administrator's Guide
In order to minimize performance impact on the AP while traffic capture is in progress, you should install
capture filters to limit which traffic is sent to the Wireshark tool. When capturing 802.11 traffic, large portion
of the captured frames tend to be beacons (typically sent every 100ms by all Access Points). Although
Wireshark supports a display filter for beacon frames, it does not support a capture filter to prevent the AP
from forwarding captured beacon packets to the Wireshark tool. In order to reduce performance impact of
capturing the 802.11 beacons, you can disable the capture beacons mode.
The remote packet capture facility is a standard feature of the Wireshark tool for Windows.
Note: Remote packet capture is not standard on the Linux version of Wireshark; the Linux version
doesn't work with the AP.
Wireshark is an open source tool and is available for free; it can be downloaded from http://
www.wireshark.org.
Table 50 describes the fields to configure the packet capture status.
Field
Remote Capture Port
Packet Capture File Download
Packet Capture File Download allows you to download the capture file by TFTP to a configured TFTP server or
by HTTP(S) to a PC. The captured packets are stored in file /tmp/apcapture.pcap on the AP. A capture is
automatically stopped when the capture file download command is triggered.
Because the capture file is located in the RAM file system, it disappears if the AP is reset.
Table 51 describes the fields to configure the packet capture status.
Field
Use TFTP to download the
capture file
TFTP Server Filename
Server IP
D-Link
November 2011
Table 50: Remote Packet Capture
Description
Specify the remote port to use as the destination for packet captures. (range 1
to 65530).
Table 51: Packet Capture File Download
Description
Select or clear this option to determine whether to use TFTP or HTTP(S) to
download the capture file:
• To download the file by using TFTP, select this option and complete the
additional fields.
• To download the file by using HTTP or HTTPS, clear this option and click
Download to browse to the location where the file is to be saved.
When using TFTP to download the file, specify a name for the packet capture
file, including the .pcap file name extension and the path to the directory
where you want to save the file.
When using TFTP to download the file, specify the IP address of the TFTP
server.
Packet Capture Configuration and Settings
Unified Access Point Administrator's Guide
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