Update: Week 05

And, we’re live!

Highlights

• I’m using Minimal Mistakes for my blog
• Packet Scavenger Hunt. Check it out here

The Long Story

This week I worked on my portfolio website! You might be reading this post from it! I build it using Jekyll. I originally building it by hand but realized I took my eye off the ball: my project I set out to do needs to get done! I decided to find a minimal theme to work from. Aptly named, Minimal Mistakes, I needed to get something up and running. There’s time to modify later. Time to work on my project, which brings me to my “Packet Scavenger Hunt”!

This week I captured various types of network traffic in Wireshark. I looked at DNS, TCP, HTTPS, ICMP, DHCP, and ARP traffic to understand how the protocols work and when they appear. Check it out here. My reach goal of making a visually appealing guide for these was out of my reach this week. I hope to swing back to it by the end of the semester but not at the expense of the project as a whole.

This week I’ll be using PyShark to analyze network traffic. I’ll read in the packet capture files (.pcap) and extract key information like timestamps, IP addresses, ports, protocols, lengths. My reach goal for this week is track conversations with a custom dataclass.

No impediments from a project perspective but got in my own way a bit. Read more about it below…

Trying to reinvent the wheel too often is a pattern I run into. I eventually made the wise decision to simplify my website build to refocus on the project itself. The first step is recognizing this pitfall earlier and earlier to cut down on how much it impacts my progress.