Transmission Control Protocol

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)

The TCP protocol provides stream based connection oriented transfer of data of the InternetProtocolFamily.

It provides the described TCP port multiplexing and much more. It establishes a logical connection, which is reliable against the problems of PacketLoss, DuplicatePackets and such.

Sending a few bytes will transfer them to the remote host, without giving any additional faulty or missing bytes to the receiving application.

History

XXX - add a brief description of TCP history

Protocol dependencies

IP: Typically, TCP uses IP as its underlying protocol. The assigned protocol number for TCP on IP is 6.

Example traffic

XXX - Add example traffic here (as plain text or Ethereal screenshot).

Ethereal

TCP dissector is fully functional.

You can select a TCP stream very fast by using the Follow TCP stream feature. First select a TCP packet in the packet list pane and then click the menu item Analyze/Follow TCP Stream

There are two statistical menu items for TCP available: Statistics/Endpoints which contains a tab showing all TCP endpoints (combination of IP address and TCP port) and Statistics/Conversations, which contains a tab showing all TCP conversations (combination of two endpoints).

Preference Settings

Example capture file

XXX - Add a simple example capture file. Keep it short, it's also a good idea to gzip it to make it even smaller, as Ethereal can open gzipped files automatically.

Display Filter

A complete list of TCP display filter fields can be found in the display filter reference

Show only the TCP based traffic:
```
 tcp 
```
Show only the traffic to and from TCP port 80 (usually HTTP):
```
 tcp.port == 80 
```

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