TCP/IP Network Traffic Analysis with Wireshark Training Course

Network Analysis Overview

1. Essentials of the OSI reference model and TCP/IP networks.
2. Troubleshooting tools and methodologies.
3. Introduction to Wireshark.
4. What is Wireshark? Overview of Portable Wireshark and available resources.
5. Wireshark GUI structure: Panes (Packet List, Details, Packet Bytes), Status Bar, and more.
6. Architecture and processing flow: Identifying what can and cannot be observed with Wireshark.
7. Supported protocols and dissectors.
8. Preferences and configurations, including global and profile-specific settings.
9. Understanding time values.
10. Lab exercises.

Capturing Traffic

1. Considerations to make before starting a capture.
2. Promiscuous mode.
3. Capture filters.
4. Automatic stop criteria.
5. Remote capture techniques.
6. Lab exercises.

Traffic Analysis: Tools and Approaches

1. Analysis checklist.
2. Utilizing features such as name resolution, colorization, marking, ignoring, commenting, and using time references and shifts.
3. Understanding the Expert System.
4. Accessing options via Right-Click functionality.
5. Interpretation of reference patterns and the impact of OS/driver Offload features.
6. Saving analysis results.
7. Lab exercises and case studies.

Traffic Analysis: Tools and Approaches (Continued)

1. Filtering traffic: Using display filters (including "in-flight" filters and macros) and following streams.
2. Quantitative analysis.
   1. Basic predefined descriptive statistics and summaries: Capture Properties, Protocol Hierarchy, Conversations, Endpoints, Packet Lengths, and IP-specific data.
   2. Protocol-specific analysis (e.g., TCP Stream Graphs).
   3. Advanced custom statistics using I/O Graph.
   4. Flow visualization.

Traffic Analysis: Protocols

1. Data-Link Layer: Ethernet II.
2. Network Layer: IPv4.
3. Transport Layer: TCP and UDP.
   1. Packet loss and recovery mechanisms.
   2. Events involving lost previous segments and Out-of-Order Segments.
   3. Duplicate ACKs and Fast Retransmissions.
   4. TCP Retransmissions.
   5. Zero Window, window changes, and other window-related issues.
4. Application Layer: HTTP and FTP.
5. Lab exercises and case studies.

Traffic Analysis: Common Issues in Network Performance Assessment

1. Root causes of performance problems.
2. Packet loss analysis.
3. Bandwidth issues and a layered approach to measurement.
4. Latency: Assessing and visualizing end-to-end latency.
5. Lab exercises.
6. Wireshark command-line tools:
   1. tshark (terminal-based Wireshark), dumpcap, rawshark, and tcpdump.
   2. editcap, mergecap, capinfos, and text2pcap.

Advanced Topics

1. Advanced filters and grouped I/O statistics.
2. Summary and Q&A session.