1 $Id: README,v 1.59 2002/07/31 19:27:39 guy Exp $
6 Ethereal is a network traffic analyzer, or "sniffer", for Unix and
7 Unix-like operating systems. It uses GTK+, a graphical user interface
8 library, and libpcap, a packet capture and filtering library.
10 The Ethereal distribution also comes with Tethereal, which is a
11 line-oriented sniffer (similar to Sun's snoop, or tcpdump) that uses the
12 same dissection, capture-file reading and writing, and packet filtering
13 code as Ethereal, and with editcap, which is a program to read capture
14 files and write the packets from that capture file, possibly in a
15 different capture file format, and with some packets possibly removed
18 The official home of Ethereal is
20 http://www.ethereal.com
22 The latest distribution can be found in the subdirectory
24 http://www.ethereal.com/distribution
30 Ethereal is known to compile and run on the following systems:
32 - Linux (2.0.x, 2.1.x, 2.2.x, 2.3.x, 2.4.x)
33 - Solaris (2.5.1, 2.6, 7)
34 - FreeBSD (2.2.5, 2.2.6, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3)
35 - Sequent PTX v4.4.5 (Nick Williams <njw@sequent.com>)
36 - Tru64 UNIX (formerly Digital UNIX) (3.2, 4.0)
38 - AIX (4.3.2, with a bit of work)
41 It should run on other Unix-ish systems without too much trouble.
43 NOTE: the Makefile appears to depend on GNU "make"; it doesn't appear to
44 work with the "make" that comes with Solaris 7 nor the BSD "make".
45 Perl is also needed to create the man page.
47 If you decide to modify the yacc grammar or lex scanner, then
48 you need "flex" - it cannot be built with vanilla "lex" -
49 and either "bison" or the Berkeley "yacc". Your flex
50 version must be 2.5.1 or greater. Check this with 'flex -V'.
52 If you decide to modify the NetWare Core Protocol dissector, you
53 will need python, as the data for packet types is stored in a python
56 You must therefore install Perl, GNU "make", "flex", and either "bison" or
57 Berkeley "yacc" on systems that lack them.
59 Full installation instructions can be found in the INSTALL file.
61 See also the appropriate README.<OS> files for OS-specific installation
67 In order to capture packets from the network, you need to be running as
68 root, or have access to the appropriate entry under /dev if your system
69 is so inclined (BSD-derived systems, and systems such as Solaris and
70 HP-UX that support DLPI, typically fall into this category). Although
71 it might be tempting to make the Ethereal executable setuid root, please
72 don't - alpha code is by nature not very robust, and liable to contain
75 Please consult the man page for a description of each command-line
76 option and interface feature.
82 The wiretap library is a packet-capture library currently under
83 development parallel to ethereal. In the future it is hoped that
84 wiretap will have more features than libpcap, but wiretap is still in
85 its infancy. However, wiretap is used in ethereal for its ability
86 to read multiple file types. You can read the following file
89 libpcap (tcpdump -w, etc.) - this is Ethereal's native format
91 Shomiti/Finisar Surveyor
93 Network General/Network Associates DOS-based Sniffer (compressed and
95 Microsoft Network Monitor
97 Cinco Networks NetXRray
98 Network Associates Windows-based Sniffer
99 AG Group/WildPackets EtherPeek/TokenPeek/AiroPeek
100 RADCOM's WAN/LAN Analyzer
101 Lucent/Ascend access products
103 Toshiba's ISDN routers
104 ISDN4BSD "i4btrace" utility
105 Cisco Secure Intrustion Detection System iplogging facility
106 pppd logs (pppdump-format files)
107 VMS's TCPIPtrace utility
108 DBS Etherwatch for VMS
109 Traffic captures from Visual Networks' Visual UpTime
110 CoSine L2 debug output
112 In addition, it can read gzipped versions of any of these files
113 automatically, if you have the zlib library available when compiling
114 Ethereal. Ethereal needs a modern version of zlib to be able to use
115 zlib to read gzipped files; version 1.1.3 is known to work. Versions
116 prior to 1.0.9 are missing some functions that Ethereal needs and won't
117 work. "./configure" should detect if you have the proper zlib version
118 available and, if you don't, should disable zlib support. You can always
119 use "./configure --disable-zlib" to explicitly disable zlib support.
121 Although Ethereal can read AIX iptrace files, the documentation on
122 AIX's iptrace packet-trace command is sparse. The 'iptrace' command
123 starts a daemon which you must kill in order to stop the trace. Through
124 experimentation it appears that sending a HUP signal to that iptrace
125 daemon causes a graceful shutdown and a complete packet is written
126 to the trace file. If a partial packet is saved at the end, Ethereal
127 will complain when reading that file, but you will be able to read all
128 other packets. If this occurs, please let the Ethereal developers know
129 at ethereal-dev@ethereal.com, and be sure to send us a copy of that trace
130 file if it's small and contains non-sensitive data.
132 Support for Lucent/Ascend products is limited to the debug trace output
133 generated by the MAX and Pipline series of products. Ethereal can read
134 the output of the "wandsession" "wandisplay", "wannext", and "wdd"
135 commands. For detailed information on use of these commands, please refer
138 "wandsession", "wandisplay", and "wannext" on the Pipeline series:
139 http://aos.ascend.com/aos:/gennavviewer.html?doc_id=0900253d80006c79
141 "wandsession", "wandisplay", and "wannext" on the MAX series:
142 http://aos.ascend.com/aos:/gennavviewer.html?doc_id=0900253d80006972
144 "wdd" on the Pipeline series:
145 http://aos.ascend.com/aos:/gennavviewer.html?doc_id=0900253d80006877
147 Ethereal can also read dump trace output from the Toshiba "Compact Router"
148 line of ISDN routers (TR-600 and TR-650). You can telnet to the router
149 and start a dump session with "snoop dump".
151 CoSine L2 debug output can also be read by Ethereal. To get the L2
152 debug output, get in the diags mode first and then use
153 "create-pkt-log-profile" and "apply-pkt-log-profile" commands under
154 layer-2 category. For more detail how to use these commands, you
155 should examine the help command by "layer-2 create ?" or "layer-2 apply ?".
157 To use the Lucent/Ascend, Toshiba and CoSine traces with Ethereal, you must
158 capture the trace output to a file on disk. The trace is happening inside
159 the router and the router has no way of saving the trace to a file for you.
160 An easy way of doing this under Unix is to run "telnet <ascend> | tee <outfile>".
161 Or, if your system has the "script" command installed, you can save
162 a shell session, including telnet to a file. For example, to a file named
165 $ script tracefile.out
166 Script started on <date/time>
168 ..... do your trace, then exit from the router's telnet session.
170 Script done on <date/time>
176 If your operating system includes IPv6 support, ethereal will attempt to
177 use reverse name resolution capabilities when decoding IPv6 packets.
179 If you want to turn off name resolution while using ethereal, start
180 ethereal with the "-n" option to turn off all name resolution (including
181 resolution of MAC addresses and TCP/UDP/SMTP port numbers to names), or
182 with the "-N mt" option to turn off name resolution for all
183 network-layer addresses (IPv4, IPv6, IPX).
185 You can make that the default setting by opening the Preferences dialog
186 box using the Preferences item in the Edit menu, selecting "Name
187 resolution", turning off the appropriate name resolution options,
188 clicking "Save", and clicking "OK".
190 If you would like to compile ethereal without support for IPv6 name
191 resolution, use the "--disable-ipv6" option with "./configure". If you
192 compile ethereal without IPv6 name resolution, you will still be able to
193 decode IPv6 packets, but you'll only see IPv6 addresses, not host names.
198 Ethereal can do some basic decoding of SNMP packets; it can also use the
199 UCD SNMP library, version 4.2.2 or later, to do more sophisticated
200 decoding, by reading MIB files and using the information in those files
201 to display OIDs and variable binding values in a friendlier fashion.
202 The configure script will automatically determine whether you have the
203 UCD SNMP library on your system, and will use it if it's version 4.2.2
204 or later. If you have an SNMP library but _do not_ want to have
205 ethereal use it, you can run configure with the "--without-ucdsnmp"
208 If you have an earlier version of the UCD SNMP library on your system,
209 the configure script will stop, reporting that it can't find the
210 "sprint_realloc_objid()" routine; you should either upgrade to version
211 4.2.4 or later, as UCD SNMP 4.2.4 fixes some potential buffer overflow
212 problems, or should configure with "--without-ucdsnmp".
217 Ethereal is still under constant development, so it is possible that you will
218 encounter a bug while using it. Please report bugs to ethereal-dev@ethereal.com.
221 1) Operating System and version (the command 'uname -sr' may
222 tell you this, although on Linux systems it will probably
223 tell you only the version number of the Linux kernel, not of
224 the distribution as a whole; on Linux systems, please tell us
225 both the version number of the kernel, and which version of
226 which distribution you're running)
227 2) Version of GTK+ (the command 'gtk-config --version' will tell you)
228 3) Version of Ethereal (the command 'ethereal -v' will tell you,
229 unless the bug is so severe as to prevent that from working,
230 and should also tell you the versions of libraries with which
232 4) The command you used to invoke Ethereal, and the sequence of
233 operations you performed that caused the bug to appear
235 If the bug is produced by a particular trace file, please be sure to send
236 a trace file along with your bug description. Please don't send a trace file
237 greater than 1 MB when compressed. If the trace file contains sensitive
238 information (e.g., passwords), then please do not send it.
240 If Ethereal died on you with a 'segmentation violation', 'bus error',
241 'abort', or other error that produces a UNIX core dump file, you can
242 help the developers a lot if you have a debugger installed. A stack
243 trace can be obtained by using your debugger ('gdb' in this example),
244 the ethereal binary, and the resulting core file. Here's an example of
245 how to use the gdb command 'backtrace' to do so.
249 ..... prints the stack trace
253 The core dump file may be named "ethereal.core" rather than "core" on
254 some platforms (e.g., BSD systems). If you got a core dump with
255 Tethereal rather than Ethereal, use "tethereal" as the first argument to
256 the debugger; the core dump may be named "tethereal.core".
261 There is no warranty, expressed or implied, associated with this product.
262 Use at your own risk.
265 Gerald Combs <gerald@ethereal.com>
266 Gilbert Ramirez <gram@alumni.rice.edu>
267 Guy Harris <guy@alum.mit.edu>