49-21
Catalyst 6500 Series Switch Software Configuration Guide—Release 8.7
OL-8978-04
Chapter 49 Configuring SPAN, RSPAN and the Mini Protocol Analyzer
Configuring the Mini Protocol Analyzer on the Switch
•
If your switch performance is adversely affected by the amount of traffic that is being processed
during a Mini Protocol Analyzer session, the CPU of the switch can become overloaded and cause
the copied packets to drop or the control packets, such as the Bridge Protocol Data Units (BPDUs),
to drop. If the switch becomes extremely overloaded, you cannot stop the Mini Protocol Analyzer
session.
•
High Availability (HA) is supported with the Mini Protocol Analyzer. However, if you perform a
soft or hard reboot of the switch and a Mini Protocol Analyzer session is in progress, the Mini
Protocol Analyzer session will not continue after the reboot until you enter the
set packet-capture
start
command.
•
You cannot view the copied traffic from a Mini Protocol Analyzer session on the system console.
You can only save the copied traffic to a file on the switch’s flash memory and view the file using
the Ethernet Network Protocol Analyzer.
•
You cannot capture Ethernet Out-of-Band Channel (EOBC) traffic with the Mini Protocol Analyzer.
•
If any VLAN on the Mini Protocol Analyzer source port is blocked by spanning tree, you might see
extra packets that are saved on the flash memory that were not actually transmitted out the source
port. The extra packets are sent through the switch fabric to the flash memory and are blocked by
spanning tree at the source port.
Configuring the Mini Protocol Analyzer from the CLI
To configure the Mini Protocol Analyzer, you specify the source port and, optionally, the name of the
output file to which the copied packets will be written.
To monitor a source port using the Mini Protocol Analyzer, perform this task in privileged mode:
Task
Command
Step 1
Configure the source port for the Mini Protocol
Analyzer session.
set packet-capture
mod
/
port
Step 2
(Optional) Specify the location and filename of
the output file for the Mini Protocol Analyzer
session.
Note
The default filename is
bootflash:eth_
yymmdd
-
hhmmss
where
yymmdd-hhmmss is the year, month, day,
hour, minute, and second when the Mini
Protocol Analyzer session was started.
set packet-capture dump-file
device
:
filename
Step 3
(Optional) Specify the filtering criteria for the
source or destination IP or MAC addresses.
set packet-capture filter
{
source
|
destination
}
{
ip
|
mac
}
Step 4
(Optional) Specify the direction of the traffic to be
captured as either receive (
rx)
, transmit (
tx)
, or
both
.
rx
is the default.
set packet-capture direction {rx | tx | both}
Step 5
(Optional) Specify the length to which the packets
that are captured by the Mini Protocol Analyzer
session are truncated.
Note
The range is 0 to 10258 bytes.
set packet-capture snap-length
packet-length