Assignment 6

SMTP Capture

I feel that I have worked on this assignment long enough to warrant posting it despite my lack of success in obtaining captures of SMTP packets.  I was able to send email by "manually" using SMTP and having to add in MAIL FROM and RCPT TO among other commands.  I accomplished this by telnetting to the localhost on port 25.
I had thought this would be a great way to generate SMTP traffic.  I was not able to telnet to localhost on shadow0, so I was also not able to utilize tcpdump.  I then generated traffic by telnetting on my pascal account and attempting to capture the traffic by using Wireshark.  Wireshark was able to capture the traffic, but because I connected to pascal using ssh, all of the traffic that may have contained the SMTP packets was encrypted , thus worthless to me.  I suppose that it is a good thing to encrypt traffic, but is not when you are trying to learn.
For now, I am throwing in the towel, but if I get some free time, I hope to come back and try further.