Are my Packets Lying? 4 Things to Look for in Packet Traces
Packets don’t lie – well, most of the time. They tell the truth unless they have been captured incorrectly. In those cases, packets can tell bold-faced lies. When digging through trace files, we can come upon symptoms in the packets that may raise an eyebrow. These are events that look strange on the surface and may even divert our troubleshooting focus for a time. In fact, some of these issues have misdirected engineers for hours, if not days, causing them to chase down issues and events that simply did not exist on the wire. Most of these examples can be avoided simply by capturing the packets from a network test access point (TAP) rather than on the machine generating the traffic.