General Information ------- ----------- Ethereal is a network traffic analyzer for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is based on GTK+, a graphical user interface library, and libpcap, a packet capture and filtering library. The official home of Ethereal is http://ethereal.zing.org The latest distribution can be found in the subdirectory http://ethereal.zing.org/distribution Installation ------------ Ethereal is known to compile and run on the following systems: - Linux (2.0.x) - Solaris (2.5.1, 2.6) - FreeBSD (2.2.5, 2.2.6) It should run on other systems without too much trouble. Full installation instructions can be found in the INSTALL file. Usage ----- In order to capture packets from the network, you need to be running as root, or have access to the appropriate entry under /dev if your system is so inclined (BSD-derived systems and Solaris typically fall into this category. Although it might be tempting to make the Ethereal executable setuid root, please don't - alpha code is by nature not very robust, and liable to contain security holes. Please consult the man page for a description of each command-line option and interface feature. Multiple File Types ------------------- The wiretap library is a packet-capture library currently under development parallel to ethereal. In the future it is hoped that wiretap will have more features than libpcap, but wiretap is still in its infancy. You can compile ethereal with the wiretap library by using './configure --with-wiretap'. Using wiretap will allow you to read pcap, Sniffer, Sun "snoop", LANalyzer, Microsoft Network Monitor, and AIX "iptrace" 2.0 trace files, but it disables display filters. You can still capture packets from within ethereal using libpcap, and therefore use libpcap-style capture filters, however. If you can live without display filters and would like to read non-pcap capture files, give wiretap a try. If you want to add support for other packet-capture file formats, please look at the wiretap source code in the wiretap directory. Please report any problems that are wiretap related to Gilbert Ramirez . He uses token-ring at work, so he is especially interested in any non-token-ring trace files you can send him. Disclaimer ---------- There is no warranty, expressed or implied, associated with this product. Use at your own risk.