I want to look at the outging HTTP protocol traffic of my own browser, on Linux, and I do have root access on the machine. What's the best or handiest packet sniffing tool to use for this? Ones I've heard of are tcpdump and ethereal.
A sniffer is a useful tool in general of course, but currently, I wanted to see how Mozilla sends HTTP basic authentication stuff to the remote server. So I started up ethereal and tried the obvious dumb thing: http://user:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ But there's nothing in the packets about authentication at all. So I tried the same sort of URL on a real server that actually is running some from of HTTP authentiation. (I suspect it only allows https authentication actually, but I tried http just to see what the packets look like.) So I the URL with a bogus username/password embedded in it, and ethereal shows: 1. Mozilla sends a GET with no authentication stuff. 2. Server replies with 401 Unauthorized. 3. Mozzilla sends "Authorization: Basic" credentials. 4. Server replies. Is that in fact the way it normally works, the browser does not send any credentials at all until asked by the server? Does anyone have a pointer to convenient code for doing the client (browser) side of that communication from Tcl or AOLserver? (I think libcurl supports it, but I have not tried that yet.) -- Andrew Piskorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.piskorski.com -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
