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Showing posts from September, 2014

How To: Trace a Packet on WiFi using OS X

If you dont know what would be the use of this article and what can be done by tracing packets, then probably this article is not for you. :) So lets begin! Find out what is the BS Device ID of your WiFi by going to System Profiler. Let me grab a screenshot here: Now lets use the command  tcpdump  to get what we are looking for. Also, there is another command  airport  to do similar job but we will cover details of that tool in upcoming post. sudo tcpdump -i en0 -s 0 -B 524288 -w ~/Desktop/TracePacket1.pcap It should display the details as - tcpdump: Listening... Once this is complete, close down the process. You have a TracePackage.pcap ready with the packets. Now we need to read what has it got. So we will leverage tcpdump again: tcpdump -s 0 -n -e -x -vvv -r ~/Desktop/TracePacket1.pcap Using this you can do network troubleshooting, debug a network problem. If you find yourself dumb enough to do this, you have some helpers out there, watch out for these tools, they will do the same