For the past three months, the same specific sound has occurred randomly on any computer (I have tested 3) attached to my wired network. I have pretty much eliminated that the cause is hardware (either replaced or swapped everything) or Windows. It has been suggested that this sound must be something passing through the network and that I should use Wireshark to scope out its origin. I have run Wireshark twice when the sound occurred. Can someone please give me some advice at what sort of event to look for in the saved log entries. Here is a recording of the sound: https://soundcloud.com/finvarra/nuc-sound-2 Thanks! asked 04 Jul '17, 16:31  finvarra edited 04 Jul '17, 16:32 |
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You have eliminated Windows? Not sure, but this sounds like some confirmation sound of an event. Go look for that in the configuration settings. Then you'll know the related event.
I've eliminated Windows because I've turned off all Windows system sounds and hooked up 3 different machines to the same network (1 running Win10, the others Win7) with only kb/mouse and heard the exact sound. In fact, one of the machines I tested was a friend's.
The chance that the sound itself is transmitted in the form of audio data over the network each time you can hear it, and as such it could be found in data captured using Wireshark, is quite small (leaving aside the issue of way too many codecs which could be used and thus the complexity of finding a sound pattern rather than a byte pattern).
It is much more likely that the sound is pre-loaded at your machine along with some application which plays it whenever a particular network event happens. So if you've got two capture files from the times when the sound occurred, you should identify those data flows in each of them which were ongoing at the moment the sound has occurred and slightly before, and then identify each single one of them, and also one-time events like DHCP address assignment or so. If two of them match by the remote IP address between the two capture files while others don't, it could be a hint. But I'd rather think of chat applications, softphones etc. first.