The Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) feature, which is sometimes called port mirroring or port monitoring, selects network traffic, from a switched port, for analysis by a network analyzer. Unfotunately this feature works only on switches or switches Layer3. And in a router, what can I do to copy the traffic? In a previous article, I explained the Embedded Packet Capture, a powerful feature to capture data packets directly on the NVRAM. Another good solution is the ‘IP traffic export‘. Introduced in 12.3(4)T IOS, the IP Traffic Export feature allows users to configure their router to export IP packets that are [...]

I have decided to write this tutorial (only for test purpose) to show how it is simple decode a G.729 stream using SPAN port, Wireshark, VoiceAge G.729 decoder and Audacity software. What is G.729? G.729 is an audio data compression algorithm for voice that compresses digital voice in packets of 10 milliseconds duration. It is officially described as Coding of speech at 8 kbit/s using conjugate-structure algebraic-code-excited linear prediction.

Usually when we admin a network, we need to know what are the protocols used more frequently, and why not, discover if someone are using improper P2P software; so we can use SPAN. The Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) feature, which is sometimes called port mirroring or port monitoring, selects network traffic for analysis by a network analyzer. For example, if you want to capture Ethernet traffic that is sent between host A and host B, you must implement SPAN feature. In this diagram, the sniffer is attached to a port (destination SPAN port) that is configured to receive a copy of [...]