Capture the packet trace

Capture the packet trace

Open Terminal, which is in the Utilities folder of your Applications folder,.
Type the following command, but replace BSDname with the BSD device name (such as en0, en1, or ppp0) from System Information:

sudo tcpdump -i BSDname -s 0 -B 524288 -w ~/Desktop/DumpFile01.pcap

Press Return, then enter your administrator password when prompted.
Terminal should say tcpdump: listening on… to incidate that it’s listening for activity on that network interface.

While Terminal is open, perform the network function that you want to test.
When the network function is complete, return to Terminal and press Control-C to capture the packet trace. Terminal saves it to your desktop in a file named “DumpFile01.pcap.”

To see the contents of the file, use this command in Terminal:

tcpdump -s 0 -n -e -x -vvv -r ~/Desktop/DumpFile01.pcap

To capture additional packet traces, modify the Terminal command to increment the number of the saved file (DumpFile02.pcap, DumpFile03.pcap, and so on).

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