A novel system and method for remotely debugging a network device is disclosed. A debug system is used to transmit debug commands over a network to the network device. The network device interprets the debug commands. The processing unit on the network device includes a special debugging mode where it is able to perform special debug operations. This special debugging mode operates at a priority that is lower than that of the network interface so that the network device can still receive network packets while being debugged. The network device also has the ability to generate responses to the debug commands in some embodiments. The concept of wireless debugging can also be applied to multi-core processors as well.