1 $Id: README,v 1.45 2000/10/08 17:16:29 gerald 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, Ethereal)
90 Sniffer (compressed and uncompressed)
97 Microsoft Network Monitor
99 RADCOM's WAN/LAN Analyzer
100 Lucent/Ascend access products
102 Toshiba's ISDN routers
103 ISDN4BSD "i4btrace" utility
104 Cisco Secure Intrustion Detection System iplogging facility
105 pppd logs (pppdump-format files)
107 In addition, it can read gzipped versions of any of these files
108 automatically, if you have the zlib library available when compiling
109 Ethereal. Ethereal needs a modern version of zlib to be able to use
110 zlib to read gzipped files; version 1.1.3 is known to work. Versions
111 prior to 1.0.9 are missing some functions that Ethereal needs and won't
112 work. "./configure" should detect if you have the proper zlib version
113 available and, if you don't, should disable zlib support. You can always
114 use "./configure --disable-zlib" to explicitly disable zlib support.
116 Although Ethereal can read AIX iptrace files, the documentation on
117 AIX's iptrace packet-trace command is sparse. The 'iptrace' command
118 starts a daemon which you must kill in order to stop the trace. Through
119 experimentation it appears that sending a HUP signal to that iptrace
120 daemon causes a graceful shutdown and a complete packet is written
121 to the trace file. If a partial packet is saved at the end, Ethereal
122 will complain when reading that file, but you will be able to read all
123 other packets. If this occurs, please let the Ethereal developers know
124 at ethereal-dev@zing.org, and be sure to send us a copy of that trace
125 file if it's small and contains non-sensitive data.
127 Support for Lucent/Ascend products is limited to the debug trace output
128 generated by the MAX and Pipline series of products. Ethereal can read
129 the output of the "wandsession" "wandisplay", "wannext", and "wdd"
130 commands. For detailed information on use of these commands, please refer
133 "wandsession", "wandisplay", and "wannext" on the Pipeline series:
134 http://aos.ascend.com/aos:/gennavviewer.html?doc_id=0900253d80006c79
136 "wandsession", "wandisplay", and "wannext" on the MAX series:
137 http://aos.ascend.com/aos:/gennavviewer.html?doc_id=0900253d80006972
139 "wdd" on the Pipeline series:
140 http://aos.ascend.com/aos:/gennavviewer.html?doc_id=0900253d80006877
142 Ethereal can also read dump trace output from the Toshiba "Compact Router"
143 line of ISDN routers (TR-600 and TR-650). You can telnet to the router
144 and start a dump session with "snoop dump".
146 To use the Lucent/Ascend and Toshiba traces with Ethereal, you must capture
147 the trace output to a file on disk. The trace is happening inside the router
148 and the router has no way of saving the trace to a file for you.
149 An easy way of doing this under Unix is to run "telnet <ascend> | tee <outfile>".
150 Or, if your system has the "script" command installed, you can save
151 a shell session, including telnet to a file. For example, to a file named
154 $ script tracefile.out
155 Script started on <date/time>
157 ..... do your trace, then exit from the router's telnet session.
159 Script done on <date/time>
165 If your operating system includes IPv6 support, ethereal will attempt to
166 use reverse name resolution capabilities when decoding IPv6 packets. If
167 you want to turn off name resolution while using ethereal, start ethereal
168 with the "-n" option. If you would like to compile ethereal without
169 support for IPv6 name resolution, use the "--disable-ipv6" option with
170 "./configure". If you compile ethereal without IPv6 name resolution,
171 you will still be able to decode IPv6 packets, but you'll only see IPv6
172 addresses, not host names.
175 NetWare Core Protocol
176 ---------------------
177 There are over 400 different NCP packet types. The NCP dissector does
178 not understand all of these; support is being added little by little. If
179 you have some NCP packets that are not dissected by Ethereal, send
180 a trace file to ethereal-dev@zing.org and if possible, we will add support
181 for those packets types.
186 Ethereal can do some basic decoding of SNMP packets; it can also use an
187 external SNMP library to do more sophisticated decoding.. The configure
188 script will automatically determine which library you have on your
189 system and will use it. If you have an SNMP library but _do not_ want
190 to have ethereal use it, you can run configure with the "--disable-snmp"
196 Ethereal is still under constant development, so it is possible that you will
197 encounter a bug while using it. Please report bugs to ethereal-dev@zing.org.
200 1) Operating System and version (the command 'uname -sr' may
201 tell you this, although on Linux systems it will probably
202 tell you only the version number of the Linux kernel, not of
203 the distribution as a whole; on Linux systems, please tell us
204 both the version number of the kernel, and which version of
205 which distribution you're running)
206 2) Version of GTK+ (the command 'gtk-config --version' will tell you)
207 3) Version of Ethereal (the command 'ethereal -v' will tell you,
208 unless the bug is so severe as to prevent that from working,
209 and should also tell you the versions of libraries with which
211 4) The command you used to invoke Ethereal, and the sequence of
212 operations you performed that caused the bug to appear
214 If the bug is produced by a particular trace file, please be sure to send
215 a trace file along with your bug description. Please don't send a trace file
216 greater than 1 MB when compressed. If the trace file contains sensitive
217 information (e.g., passwords), then please do not send it.
219 If Ethereal died on you with a 'segmentation violation', 'bus error',
220 'abort', or other error that produces a UNIX core dump file, you can
221 help the developers a lot if you have a debugger installed. A stack
222 trace can be obtained by using your debugger ('gdb' in this example),
223 the ethereal binary, and the resulting core file. Here's an example of
224 how to use the gdb command 'backtrace' to do so.
228 ..... prints the stack trace
232 The core dump file may be named "ethereal.core" rather than "core" on
233 some platforms (e.g., BSD systems). If you got a core dump with
234 Tethereal rather than Ethereal, use "tethereal" as the first argument to
235 the debugger; the core dump may be named "tethereal.core".
240 There is no warranty, expressed or implied, associated with this product.
241 Use at your own risk.
244 Gerald Combs <gerald@zing.org>
245 Gilbert Ramirez <gram@xiexie.org>
246 Guy Harris <guy@alum.mit.edu>