monitor packet traffic between sqla client and server

[Former Member]

Hi. I am trying to use WireShark (WS) to monitor traffic between client and server, on the same machine. The application talks to sqla through an odbc dsn, set for tcpip on port 2638. WS reports a blizzard of traffic, even before I start sqla. When I start sqla, the same inscrutable blizzard just continues. When I set WS to report only traffic on port 2638, the traffic screen goes blank. I want to use a packet monitor to observe packet traffic between sqla client and server, when sqla is running with different encryption settings. Any thoughts/suggestions appreciated. Thanks.

[VolkerBarth]

Just two guesses:

• Are you sure the connection is using TCP/IP at all (and not shared memory, as would be typical for same-box communication)?

• What happens when you monitor the client port (as specified by sa_conn_info()) instead of the server port (2638 by default)?

[ian_mchardy]

My experience with WireShark on Windows is that local machine TCP/IP traffic is not captured by WireShark. In order to capture packets with WireShark, I needed to make sure the client and server were on different machines.

[graeme_perrow]

There is a tool called RawCap that apparently does work for same-machine connections. I have never used it myself, but at least one person here has, and it seems to work well.

[t1950]

To be sure you're using tcpip, start the db engine from the run command something like this

dbsrvX -x tcpip -n engineName c:\\database\\x.db

When you set up your ODBC connection, on the database tab enter engineName in the server name field, leave all of the other fields blank EXCEPT the encryption key, and on the network tab check TCPIP and uncheck Shared memory.