Saturday, February 4, 2017

Analyzing or understanding IEEE1905.1 packet captured in Wireshark




Step:1
The snapshot provided below is Wireshark capture of IEEE1905.1 control packet.
  • The EtherType value assigned to 1905.1 Control Message Data Unit (CMDU) is 0x893a.
  • The EtherType is the Protocol value shown in the below snapshot.
  • The following are the 4 different types of IEEE1905.1 topology messages
    • Discovery: Message Type is 0x0000, to detect Direct Neighbors
    • Notification: Message Type is 0x0001, to inform network devices about a topology change.
    • The following 2 are used to get the topology database of another IEEE1905.1 device
      • Query: Message Type is 0x0002
      • Response:Message Type is 0x0003
    •  Vendor Specific Message: Message Type is 0x0004
  • The Group Address used for Discovery and Notification messages is 01:80:c2:00:00:13.
  • This means that the MAC address 01:80:c2:00:00:13 is used as the destination address while sending the Discovery/Notification messages.
  • To analyze all the Discovery/Notification messages add the filter (eth.dst==01:80:c2:00:00:13) in Wireshark as shown in the below snapshot.
  • Wireshark tool understands the Group MAC Address 01:80:c2:00:00:13 is IEEE-1905.1-Control message.



Step:2
Let's go further to understand the header information in the IEEE1905.1 Discovery message.

The generic CMDU frame format is,



Analyzing the CMDU frame received in Ethernet captured in Wireshark.
 


That's it.