Hi i have an assignment at school where i have to use wireshark to analyse packets on a network. one of the experiments is to analyse a quiet network on one of the machines at school. how do i make a network quiet. My lecturer gives an example of what a quiet network might look like. Its all SSDP. But when I try it I get TCP and loads of other stuff I've tried using filters but i cant get it like his. Is a quiet network always like his or can ther be varying types of quietness
Thanks in advance.

Maybe your teacher is expecting you to create an appropriate filter to only view unusual traffic?

Not sure what he would mean by quiet networks. Ask him or her to clarify.

Moved to forum lobby...

You will only be able to observe broadcast traffic if you're on a switched fabric... You will need to be creating traffic yourself if you want to view it on your network card.

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Our college network runs Novell Netware so there's IPX traffic on the wire all the time, then when the class next door fires up there's a milllion ARP requests, and there's always STP PDUs and before we pulled the Network Admin into line (which did not impress them!) there was even OSPF traffic to the desktop.

When I first demo Wireshark to my class I just launch a browser and go to www.cisco.com but in 2 to 3 minutes I usually collect at least a couple of thousand packets because of all that other stuff.

A quiet network? What's that?

Aubrey

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The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. Alvin Toffler, "Future Shock" 1970

Try per-port vlans and bind them to really small subnets like /30 then you'll only have max 2 hosts on one segment. That should make things pretty quiet .

Good idea but students do not normally have that type of access and control over their school's network

If fact neither do instructors - this depicts the usual Network Adminiistration approach to users very accurately.

Aubrey

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The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. Alvin Toffler, "Future Shock" 1970

what if you used port spanning?

I imagine it would be difficult to study traffic if you were on a network with a lot of activity going on. Using a home network/router would seem to work for this lab.