Summary

Congratulations! If you accomplished all the activities covered in this chapter, you have successfully installed Wireshark, performed a packet capture, created a filter to isolate and display just the packets you were interested in from all the extraneous noise, and created a new packet trace file containing just those packets so you can analyze them later. Moreover, in the process, you gained an initial familiarity with the Wireshark user interface and you learned how to use several of its most useful and powerful features. Not bad for a first chapter.

In the next chapter, we'll review some essential network concepts needed to provide a solid foundation to perform packet-level analysis. The main goal of the next chapter is to help you develop a mental model of networking that lends itself well to packet-level analysis without getting too tangled up in unnecessary details.