TCP segment of a reassembled PDU

Question

In wireshark sometimes I see this:

478195  5738.896809 192.168.1.79    61.213.44.124   TCP [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]

What is a PDU? Was it reassembled? What does this mean?

Solution

A "PDU" is a "Protocol Data Unit." One unit of information being transferred in accordance with a given protocol (e.g., "login USERNAME very-long-base64-encoded-authentication-data" then wait for server to respond) will be disassembled into many packets (smaller pieces) if it's too large to fit in one packet (or segment in this case).

This is normal and is just TCP/IP working as designed.

Comments

[Admin]

PDU: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_data_unit

[Cas]

Welcome to Super User! On this Q&A site we try to provide good answers to questions people ask. Part of providing a good answer is making sure you fully read the question and understand what's being asked. In this case, the question was about what PDU means, not how you might see a different interpretation of the data.