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The Basics of Network Tracing

Will Aftring shows how to put together a network trace:

I know it can be tempting to spin up WireShark and jump right into looking at traces, but asking questions is just as important, if not more important than the traces themselves. 

I usually like to group these questions into two groups: technical and general. 

Note: I will be using the terms client and server to refer to the sender and receiver. The client is always the sender, the server is always the receiver. 

Read on to get an idea of why we might create a network trace, what we intend to learn from it, and then how to do it.