When it comes to analyzing network problems, debugging client / server communication or just monitoring network traffic, a protocol analyzer (packet sniffer) is king.
There are a number of packet sniffers out there, two of the most popular are Wireshark (formerly Ethereal) and tcpdump. Tshark is the console (command line) version of Wireshark.
For a server, I prefer to run the latest stable release of Debian, but once in a while I need a newer package than what’s available from the stable repository.
The solution is in the Apt How-To available from Debian. See section 3.8, title “How to keep a mixed system“.
Some time ago I was looking for tools to monitor network bandwidth usage by clients. Needed something to run on my super awesome Linux router/firewall (Vyatta) to see what everyone on the network is doing and on the Xen VM hosts to keep an eye on the virtual machines.
As always with Linux, there are lots of quality projects worth serious consideration, so the hardest part was to narrow the plethora of choices down to a manageable number to test.
I’m used to System V style commands used in Red Hat / Fedora and derivatives as well as SUSE, so I found Debian service management methods unintuitive at first.
Below are a couple of personal notes I made on the subject to help myself out, as I was getting used to the Debian way of things…
VIM is an awesome text editor and syntax highlighting is one of its many awesome features. To enable VIM syntax highlighting globally for all users, simply uncomment “Syntax on” in the VIM config file (which is typically /etc/vimrc). So long as your VIM version supports syntax highlighting, VIM will automagically highlight syntax for most common files. That’s great, but sometimes you might run into a situation where you’re working with a file VIM won’t automagically highlight syntax for. Let’s say you really, really would like it to. Here’s how….