tcpdump not capturing any packets

Question

I'm trying to monitor what's going on in my network, so I've tried tcpdump command. I'm just learning to use it, so I thought on playing around a little bit with it.

My problem is that I cannot capture any packet using just tcpdump without any parameters.

when I type tcpdump, I get this answer:

tcpdump: packet printing is not supported for link type BLUETOOTH_HCI_H4_WITH_PHDR: use -w

So I tried tcpdump: tcpdump -w archivito And I've got this:

listening on bluetooth0, link-type BLUETOOTH_HCI_H4_WITH_PHDR (Bluetooth HCI UART transport layer plus pseudo-header),

capture size 65535 bytes

0 packets captured

62 packets received by filter

0 packets dropped by kernel

So the archivito file was empty, so I've tried: tcpdump port 80 And I've got this reply:

tcpdump: Bluetooth link-layer type filtering not implemented

How may I get some output from tcpdump? I've read the man pages about this command, but couldn't understand why it's not working for me.

So, I then tried sudo tcpdump -w archivito, and I've got this output:

tcpdump: WARNING: eth0: no IPv4 address assigned tcpdump: listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 65535 bytes

It remains there for a while, but all I still get is

0 packets captured

0 packets received by filter

0 packets dropped by kernel

Finally I tried sudo tcpdump -i any, and it worked (it captured several packets). But why it worked ONLY when asking it to monitor in all interfaces?

Solution 1

As per the tcpdump man page:

   -i     Listen  on  interface.   If  unspecified, tcpdump searches the system interface list for the lowest numbered, configured up interface (excluding loop‐
          back), which may turn out to be, for example, ``eth0''.

          On Linux systems with 2.2 or later kernels, an interface argument of ``any'' can be used to capture packets from all interfaces.  Note  that  captures
          on the ``any'' device will not be done in promiscuous mode.

So, looking at your output, seems that the first available interface is bluetooth0 which does not allow packet printing, and thus the error.

However, if specifying the -i flag to any, you're picking up any available interface that allows packet printing and that's why it works in this case.

Solution 2

I'm not in front of it right now but

there is a switch for tcpdump to list all interfaces, then you can specify specifically the one you want. Try tcpdump --list-interfaces then you can do e.g. tcpdump -i eth0 or whatever particular interface you want to listen on.