How to......Wireshark

[discoveranother]

Hi all,

 

I've never really used Wireshark but have installed it. Just wondered if anyone out there can be please guide me how to check for broadcast storms in Wireshark and also anything other such applications they recommend for testing broadcasts ?

 

Thanks all

[Chaniel]

You'll want some basic knowledge on networking to fully understand what you're seeing in Wireshark, but on the actual tool usage then Ross Bagurdes has a pretty good set of tutorials on it on Pluralsight: https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/wireshark-introduction

 

If you have a broadcast storm, you should be able to start a capture for a few seconds and if you see thousands of broadcasts a second, you're likely to have a broadcast storm. You can go to Statistics > Conversations and sort by packets and the highest is likely a good place to start.

 

With a broadcast storm though, you're better off (imo) using managed switches and monitoring so that you can enable spanning tree, storm control etc. Monitoring will enable you to be alerted if a loop is detected

[discoveranother]

You'll want some basic knowledge on networking to fully understand what you're seeing in Wireshark, but on the actual tool usage then Ross Bagurdes has a pretty good set of tutorials on it on Pluralsight: https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/wireshark-introduction

 

If you have a broadcast storm, you should be able to start a capture for a few seconds and if you see thousands of broadcasts a second, you're likely to have a broadcast storm. You can go to Statistics > Conversations and sort by packets and the highest is likely a good place to start.

 

With a broadcast storm though, you're better off (imo) using managed switches and monitoring so that you can enable spanning tree, storm control etc. Monitoring will enable you to be alerted if a loop is detected

 

Thank you for your response.