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 Unfortunately Ethereal is really a decoder to help people that can't 
decode hex in their head to have a human-readable breakdown of packets. It 
really can't teach you by itself how communications protocols work. That said, 
you really need to work from the top down. Not having the trace in front of me 
but I would hope that most of the packets you refer to have something other than 
TCP or IP in the protocol field. As a guess I imagine that AS-REQ and TGS-REP 
will have "Kerberos" as the protocol (I did a search for TGS-REP on Google and 
guess what popped up). What you then need to do is find a reference for Kerberos 
(maybe the RFCs or other tutorials). Similarly SAM Logon is to do with NT 
Authentication (again from Google) presumably under the SMB or NetBios protocol. 
Again a reference on these protocols is useful. 
  
Yes 
there are lots of general protocol and communications books out there but 
unfortunately they always by necessity have a cutoff as far as detail on 
specific protocols go. Fortunately most protocols follow a fairly standard 
request/response or advertisement sequence, and with sufficiently detailed 
decoding you can usually surmise what is going on. Anyway, good 
luck! 
  
Martin 
Visser Network 
Consultant  Technology & Infrastructure - Consulting & 
Integration COMPAQ, part of the new HP
  3 Richardson Place  North Ryde, Sydney NSW 2113, 
Australia  Phone (: 
+61-2-9022-1670    
Mobile È: +61-411-254-513    Fax 7: +61-2-9022-1800     E-mail + : martin.visserAThp.com   
  
  
  Hi all 
  i'm quite a novice in using & 
  interpreting ethereal captures. my main trouble is i need some kind of ref. to 
  figure out what the contents of the "info" field mean. i could tell a few, but 
  not most, ie. what "SAM LOGON request from client" or "AS-REQ", or "TGS-REP" 
  mean? how can i interpret what's going on in a capture? u get the 
  idea. 
    
  anyhow, any help or ref. to any useful 
  resource is much appreciated. 
    
  thank u all 
  another 
novice  
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