tcpdump/snort to capture chat sessions

[Tom Judge]

Bill Moran wrote:
> In response to R J <rjohanne at wnk.hamline.edu>:
> 
>> I am trying to use tcpdump (or snort, but they are both behaving the same 
>> in this case) to capture all the lines or contents of an msn 
>> chat session, the actual conversation.  I am getting partial output; i.e, 
>> I'll only get half of a sentence, and I don't see the rest of the lines. 
>> And ofcourse, alot of it seems to be hex or obfuscated html?
>>
>> What switches do I need to capture the entire lines of text?
> 
> Don't know about snort, but with tcpdump use -s0
> 
This is a good start however you are not guaranteed to see the whole 
chat message in a single TCP packet.  If you are looking for something 
more advanced you will have to write a program around pcap/bpf or 
similar to read the TCP stream.

Tom J