From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Luca Ferrari Subject: looking at the network traffic Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 16:52:54 +0200 Sender: linux-admin-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <200406251652.54855.fluca1978@virgilio.it> Reply-To: fluca1978@virgilio.it Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: linux-admin@vger.kernel.org Hi, using program such as ethereal, tcpdump, etc. is it possible to see the network traffic also if the hosts are connected thru a switch? I mean, if A,B,C, are on the same network, connected with a switch, can A see the traffic among B and C? I suppose no, since the switch should route the traffic to the right host directly (while an hub should not), and the only thing I can see should be message broadcasts and something similar. Is it right? Is there a way to observe the traffic over a network even if there are switches? I don't want to break user's privacy, but since I'm developing a program which should connect to a peer-to-peer client, and I don't have protocol specifications, I was wondering about a traffic dump of a session among two users. Nevertheless I was unable due to (I suppose) the switch. Thanks, Luca -- Luca Ferrari, fluca1978@virgilio.it