%general-entities; ]> $LastChangedBy$ $Date$ The Ethereal package contains a network protocol analyzer, also known as a sniffer. This is useful for analyzing data captured off the wire from a live network connection, or data read from a capture file. Ethereal provides both GUI and TTY-mode programs for examining captured network packets from over 500 protocols, as well as the capability to read capture files from many other popular network analyzers. Download (HTTP): Download (FTP): Download MD5 Sum: ðereal-md5sum; Download size: ðereal-size; Estimated disk space required: ðereal-buildsize; Estimated build time: ðereal-time; or (to build the TTY-mode front-end only) (required to capture data) , or (to build the GUI front-end), , or , , , , Net-SNMP and adns Install Ethereal by running the following commands: ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc \ --enable-randpkt --enable-threads && make && make install --enable-randpkt: This parameter builds the random capture program. --enable-threads: This parameter enables the use of threads in ethereal. /etc/ethereal.conf and ~/.ethereal/preferences Though the default configuration parameters are very sane, reference the configuration section of the Ethereal User's Guide for configuration information. Most of Ethereal's configuration can be accomplished using the menu options of the ethereal GUI interface. The kernel must have the Packet protocol enabled for Ethereal to capture live packets from the network. Enable the Packet protocol by choosing Y in the Device Drivers – Networking support – Networking options – Packet socket configuration parameter. Alternatively, build the af_packet module by choosing M in this parameter. Note: If you want to look at packets, make sure you don't filter them out with . If you want to exclude certain classes of packets, it is more efficient to do it with iptables than Ethereal. The Ethereal package contains capinfos, dftest, editcap, ethereal, idl2eth, mergecap, randpkt, tethereal, text2pcap, libethereal, libwiretap and many dissector plugin modules. capinfos reads a saved capture file and returns any or all of several statistics about that file. It is able to detect and read any capture supported by the Ethereal package. dftest is a display-filter-compiler test program. editcap edits and/or translates the format of capture files. It knows how to read libpcap capture files, including those of tcpdump, Ethereal and other tools that write captures in that format. ethereal is a GUI network protocol analyzer. It lets you interactively browse packet data from a live network or from a previously saved capture file. idl2eth takes a user specified CORBA IDL file and generates C source code that can be used to create an Ethereal plugin. mergecap combines multiple saved capture files into a single output file. randpkt creates random-packet capture files. tethereal is a TTY-mode network protocol analyzer. It lets you capture packet data from a live network or read packets from a previously saved capture file. text2pcap reads in an ASCII hex dump and writes the data described into a libpcap-style capture file.