---
title: Examining network communication
description: Because the server is a network-based application, it can be valuable to observe the network communication that it has with clients. The server itself can provide details about its interaction with clients by enabling debugging for the protocol or data debug categories, but there can be a number of cases in which it is useful to view information at a much lower level. A network sniffer, like the tcpdump tool on Linux, can be used to accomplish this.
component: pingauthorize
version: 10.1
page_id: pingauthorize:troubleshooting_pingauthorize_server:paz_examine_network_comm
canonical_url: https://docs.pingidentity.com/pingauthorize/10.1/troubleshooting_pingauthorize_server/paz_examine_network_comm.html
revdate: August 29, 2023
---

# Examining network communication

Because the server is a network-based application, it can be valuable to observe the network communication that it has with clients. The server itself can provide details about its interaction with clients by enabling debugging for the protocol or data debug categories, but there can be a number of cases in which it is useful to view information at a much lower level. A network sniffer, like the `tcpdump` tool on Linux, can be used to accomplish this.

There are many options that can be used with these tools, and their corresponding manual pages provide a more thorough explanation of their use. However, to perform basic tracing to show the full details of the packets received, for example, on port 389 with remote host 1.2.3.4, the following command can be used on Linux:

```
tcpdump -i  <interface>  -n -XX -s 0 host 1.2.3.4 and port 389
```

It does not appear that the `tcpdump` tool provides support for LDAP parsing. However, it is possible to write capture data to a file rather than displaying information on the terminal (using `-w` *\<path>* with `tcpdump`), so that information can be later analyzed with a graphical tool like Wireshark, which provides the ability to interpret LDAP communication on any port.

|   |                                                                                                                                      |
| - | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
|   | Enabling network tracing generally requires privileges that are not available to normal users and therefore can require root access. |