4 Ethereal is a network traffic analyzer for Unix and Unix-like operating
5 systems. It is based on GTK+, a graphical user interface library,
6 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
20 Ethereal is known to compile and run on the following systems:
23 - Solaris (2.5.1, 2.6)
24 - FreeBSD (2.2.5, 2.2.6)
26 It should run on other systems without too much trouble.
29 Full installation instructions can be found in the INSTALL file.
35 In order to capture packets from the network, you need to be running
36 as root, or have access to the appropriate entry under /dev if your
37 system is so inclined (BSD-derived systems and Solaris typically fall
38 into this category. Although it might be tempting to make the
39 Ethereal executable setuid root, please don't - alpha code is by nature
40 not very robust, and liable to contain security holes.
42 Please consult the man page for a description of each command-line
43 option and interface feature.
49 The wiretap library is a packet-capture library currently under
50 development parallel to ethereal. In the future it is hoped that
51 wiretap will have more features than libpcap, but wiretap is still in
52 its infancy. You can compile ethereal with the wiretap library by using
53 './configure --with-wiretap'. Using wiretap will allow you to read
54 pcap, Sniffer, Sun "snoop", LANalyzer, Microsoft Network Monitor, and
55 AIX "iptrace" 2.0 trace files, but it disables display filters. You can
56 still capture packets from within ethereal using libpcap, and therefore
57 use libpcap-style capture filters, however.
59 If you can live without display filters and would like to read non-pcap
60 capture files, give wiretap a try. If you want to add support for other
61 packet-capture file formats, please look at the wiretap source code in the
64 Please report any problems that are wiretap related to
65 Gilbert Ramirez <gram@verdict.uthscsa.edu>. He uses token-ring at work, so he
66 is especially interested in any non-token-ring trace files you can send him.
72 There is no warranty, expressed or implied, associated with this product.