Using Wireshark to Capture Network Traffic in Matter#

When developing a wireless application it is often useful to be able to visualize the network traffic. Wireshark is a great tool for this, but you can't use Wireshark alone. You first have to capture the network traffic off a wireless network interface. Fortunately Silicon Labs has provided an open source project for capturing network traffic off its devices called the Java Packet Trace Library or Silabs PTI .jar

Here are the following steps for capturing and visualizing network traffic with Wireshark and the Java Packet Trace Library:

1. Clone and Build Silabs-PTI.jar Out of the Java Packet Trace Library#

The Java Packet Trace Library can be built locally for your development platform. First clone the repository and then build the library according to the instructions

2. Download Wireshark#

If you don't have Wireshark, you can download Wireshark for your development platform here.

3. Follow Instructions for Wireshark Integration#

To capture from a Silicon Labs device like a WSTK use the Silabs-PTI.jar utility you built in the previous step. You will further need to integrate the execution of the utility into Wireshark through Wireshark's excap interface. A complete guide to Wireshark Integration is provided here. You integrate the Silabs-PTI.jar utility into Wirehshark by adding a small script into Wireshark's excap directory. Make sure that you make the script executable using something like

$ chmod 777 <myexcapscript>

This will make it so that Wireshark can execute the script and integrate the WSTK interfaces into its capture functionality.

4. Run Wireshark and Discover and Capture using Silabs-PTI.jar#

In order to capture from an adapter such as a WSTK using the utility Silabs-PTI.jar that you built in step 2, your adapter must be connected to the network via Ethernet. If your adapter is not connected via Ethernet and only via USB you will need to use the silink utility to make the adapter show up as a localhost.

Once your adapter is connected, you can test out the visibility of your WSTK on the network by running Silabs-PTI.jar from the command line using the following command:

$ java -jar silabs-pti-<VERSION>.jar -discover