Traffic Capture
Availability
Traffic capture is available on all our ADSL and FTTC lines.
Accessing This Feature
Access is via the Control Pages as follows:
- Log in to the Control Pages with your xxx@a login
- Click on the line you want to run a capture on
- Click on the 'Traffic Dump' button, and follow the instructions from there
Information
This will perform a traffic capture of your line (or lines if you have more than one). You can then view the capture on the page or download a pcap file which can be viewed with other software - e.g. Wireshark, this makes viewing and analyzing the traffic easier. Only the headers are captured, not the content.
The Fields are:
- Timestamp
- Direction (Tx/Rx)
- Length/size of the packet
- Session ID
- Protocol, e.g. IP, IPv6 etc.
- Length/Size of the payload
- Source IP Address and port
- Destination IP Address and port
- Packet type, e.g. ICMP echo reply
Free free to ask support staff for help in understanding a traffic dump if you're having problems. - we don't save the dumps, so if you want to discuss your capture with staff, please copy/paste the dump and email it in.
Clues to look for
Using the traffic dump tool can be good to diagnose a slow connection. i.e., if you have loads of traffic on your line, the line will become slow. Using the Traffic Dump tool you'll be able to see what the traffic is, and that may then help pin point the source of the traffic.
Example
Here is a simple example, which actually only shows a few ICMP pings.
You will see our LCP echos every second, these are used to monitor the line and are used to create our CQM Graphs, they looks like this:
14:54:32.577431 Rx length 30: [ses 0x3776] LCP (0xc021), length 10: LCP, [|LCP]