Q: Packet Dumping?

[Alex Satrapa]

Sorry to bother you all... but I keep seeing references to "packet dumping"
or "net tracing" when the Samba team (and others) are talking about
implementing new protocols...

Now I'm wondering, how do you do this? Can I just tell my Linux 2.0.31 box
to go into promiscuous mode and record all packets carrying NetBIOS data,
destined for any machine? Or is the packet dumping the Samba team are
referring to part of the debug function of samba itself?  Even worse...
would I need to buy specialist hardware to do this properly?*

If this is covered in the docs, please point me to it. I've read through
most of the docs directory already, but I probably ignored anything about
packet dumping/sniffing at the time, considering it irrelevant to my needs.

Thanks for your patience.
Alex

*My favourite experience with protocol analysers was half an hour I got to
watch a guy track down some faults in a mixed LAN using a Wandel-Goltermann
WG50 protocol analyser. Very nice stuff... but it looked like "just" a
Windows 3.11 PC with some fancy software, in a pretty box.

Windows 95: n. 32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch
to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor,
written by a 2 bit company.