If you as I need to get some traffic from a Mikrotik router and /tool sniffer quick doesn’t cut it, as you need not just the headers the best way is stream the traffic to the a Linux box. The Mikrotik configuration is easy, just set the server you want to stream to:
/tool sniffer set streaming-enabled=yes streaming-server=<ip_of_the_server>
Configure a filter as you don’t want to stream everything:
/tool sniffer set filter-ip-address=<an_example_filter_ip>
and now you need only to start it with
/tool sniffer start
and check with
/tool sniffer print
if everything is running.
But now comes the part that is not documented that well. Searching through the internet I found some posts/articles on how to use Wireshark for capturing, but that does not work correctly – at least not for me.
If you configure the capture filter to udp port 37008 to get everything the router sends via TZSP you will see following lines
If you now set the display filter to show only TZSP these packets are not displayed any more. This packets contain information we need and I was not able to configure Wireshark 1.10.2 to work correctly. If you know how to get it to work, please write a comment. I changed my approach to use an other program to write the packets to disk and look at them later with Wireshark. And I found a program from Mikrotik directly which does that. Go to the download page and download Trafr and extract and use it like this:
$ tar xzf trafr.tgz
$ ./trafr
usage: trafr <file | -s> [ip_addr]
-s write output to stdout. pipe it into tcpdump for example:
./trafr -s | /usr/sbin/tcpdump -r -
ip_addr use to filter one source router by ip address
$ ./trafr test.pcap <ip_of_the_router>
After you stopped the program you can open the file in Wireshark and no packets are missing.
