4 Ethereal is a network traffic analyzer, or "sniffer", for Unix and
5 Unix-like operating systems. It uses GTK+, a graphical user interface
6 library, and libpcap, a packet capture and filtering library.
8 The official home of Ethereal is
10 http://ethereal.zing.org
12 The latest distribution can be found in the subdirectory
14 http://ethereal.zing.org/distribution
16 Interesting and exotic packet traces can be found at
18 http://ethereal.zing.org/~gram/sample.html
24 Ethereal is known to compile and run on the following systems:
26 - Linux (2.0.x, 2.1.x, 2.2.x)
27 - Solaris (2.5.1, 2.6)
28 - FreeBSD (2.2.5, 2.2.6)
29 - Sequent PTX v4.4.5 (Nick Williams <njw@sequent.com>)
30 - Tru64 UNIX (formerly Digital UNIX) (3.2, 4.0)
32 - AIX (4.3.2, with a bit of work)
34 It should run on other systems without too much trouble.
36 NOTE: the Makefile appears to depend on GNU "make"; it doesn't appear to
37 work with the "make" that comes with Solaris 7 nor the BSD "make".
38 Perl is also needed to create the man page.
40 If you decide to modify the yacc grammar or lex scanner, then
41 you need "flex" - it cannot be built with vanilla "lex" -
42 and either "bison" or the Berkeley "yacc". Your flex
43 version must be 2.5.1 or greater. Check this with 'flex -V'.
45 You must therefore install Perl, GNU "make", "flex", and either "bison" or
46 Berkeley "yacc" on systems that lack them.
48 Full installation instructions can be found in the INSTALL file.
50 See also the appropriate README.<OS> files for OS-specific installation
56 In order to capture packets from the network, you need to be running
57 as root, or have access to the appropriate entry under /dev if your
58 system is so inclined (BSD-derived systems and Solaris typically fall
59 into this category. Although it might be tempting to make the
60 Ethereal executable setuid root, please don't - alpha code is by nature
61 not very robust, and liable to contain security holes.
63 Please consult the man page for a description of each command-line
64 option and interface feature.
70 The wiretap library is a packet-capture library currently under
71 development parallel to ethereal. In the future it is hoped that
72 wiretap will have more features than libpcap, but wiretap is still in
73 its infancy. However, wiretap is used in ethereal for its ability
74 to read multiple file types. You can read the following file
75 formats, and create display filters for them as well:
77 libpcap (tcpdump -w), Sniffer (uncompressed), NetXray, Sniffer Pro,
78 snoop, Shomiti, LANalyzer, Network Monitor, AIX's iptrace 2.0,
79 RADCOM's WAN/LAN Analyzer, Lucent/Ascend access products, HP-UX's nettl,
80 and Toshiba's ISDN routers.
82 Although Ethereal can read AIX iptrace files, the documentation on
83 AIX's iptrace packet-trace command is sparse. The 'iptrace' command
84 starts a daemon which you must kill in order to stop the trace. Through
85 experimentation it appears that sending a HUP signal to that iptrace
86 daemon causes a graceful shutdown and a complete packet is written
87 to the trace file. If a partial packet is saved at the end, Ethereal
88 will complain when reading that file, but you will be able to read all
89 other packets. If this occurs, please let the Ethereal developers know
90 at ethereal-dev@zing.org, and be sure to send us a copy of that trace
91 file if it's small and contains non-sensitive data.
93 Support for Lucent/Ascend products is limited to the debug trace output
94 generated by the MAX and Pipline series of products. Ethereal can read
95 the output of the "wandsession" "wandisplay", "wannext", and "wdd"
96 commands. For detailed information on use of these commands, please refer
99 "wandsession", "wandisplay", and "wannext" on the Pipeline series:
100 http://aos.ascend.com/aos:/gennavviewer.html?doc_id=0900253d80006c79
102 "wandsession", "wandisplay", and "wannext" on the MAX series:
103 http://aos.ascend.com/aos:/gennavviewer.html?doc_id=0900253d80006972
105 "wdd" on the Pipeline series:
106 http://aos.ascend.com/aos:/gennavviewer.html?doc_id=0900253d80006877
108 Ethereal can also read dump trace output from the Toshiba "Compact Router"
109 line of ISDN routers (TR-600 and TR-650). You can telnet to the router
110 and start a dump session with "snoop dump".
112 To use the Lucent/Ascend and Toshiba traces with Ethereal, you must capture
113 the trace output to a file on disk. The trace is happening inside the router
114 and the router has no way of saving the trace to a file for you.
115 An easy way of doing this under Unix is to run "telnet <ascend> | tee <outfile>".
116 Or, if your system has the "script" command installed, you can save
117 a shell session, including telnet to a file. For example, to a file named
120 $ script tracefile.out
121 Script started on <date/time>
123 ..... do your trace, then exit from the router's telnet session.
125 Script done on <date/time>
131 If your operating system includes IPv6 support, ethereal will attempt to
132 use reverse name resolution capabilities when decoding IPv6 packets. If
133 you want to turn off name resolution while using ethereal, start ethereal
134 with the "-n" option. If you would like to compile ethereal without
135 support for IPv6 name resolution, use the "--disable-ipv6" option with
136 "./configure". If you compile ethereal without IPv6 name resolution,
137 you will still be able to decode IPv6 packets, but you'll only see IPv6
138 addresses, not host names.
140 The "Follow TCP Stream" feature only supports TCP over IPv4. Support for TCP
141 over IPv6 is planned.
146 Ethereal can do some basic decoding of SNMP packets, but it relies on an
147 external SNMP library to do this. You can use either the UCD or the CMU
148 SNMP libraries. The configure script will automatically determine which
149 library you have on your system and will use it. If you have an SNMP
150 library but _do not_ want to have ethereal use it, you can run configure
151 with the "--disable-snmp" option. No SNMP support will be compiled into
152 ethereal with this option.
157 Ethereal is still under constant development, so it is possible that you will
158 encounter a bug while using it. Please report bugs to ethereal-dev@zing.org.
161 1) Operating System and version (the command 'uname -sr' may
162 tell you this, although on Linux systems it will probably
163 tell you only the version number of the Linux kernel, not of
164 the distribution as a whole; on Linux systems, please tell us
165 both the version number of the kernel, and which version of
166 which distribution you're running)
167 2) Version of GTK+ (the command 'gtk-config --version' will tell you)
168 3) Version of Ethereal (the command 'ethereal -v' will tell you,
169 unless the bug is so severe as to prevent that from working,
170 and should also tell you the version of GTK+ and, if built
171 with "libpcap", the version of "libpcap" with which it was
173 4) The command you used to invoke Ethereal, and the sequence of
174 operations you performed that caused the bug to appear
176 If the bug is produced by a particular trace file, please be sure to send
177 a trace file along with your bug description. Please don't send a trace file
178 greater than 1 MB when compressed. If the trace file contains sensitive
179 information (e.g., passwords), then please do not send it.
181 If Ethereal died on you with a 'segmentation violation', you can help the
182 developers a lot if you have a debugger installed. A stack trace can be
183 obtained by using your debugger ('gdb' in this example), the ethereal binary,
184 and the resulting core file. Here's an example of how to use the gdb
185 command 'backtrace' to do so.
189 ..... prints the stack trace
196 There is no warranty, expressed or implied, associated with this product.
197 Use at your own risk.
200 Gerald Combs <gerald@zing.org>
201 Gilbert Ramirez <gram@xiexie.org>