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 It should run on other systems without too much trouble.
34 NOTE: the Makefile appears to depend on GNU "make"; it doesn't appear to
35 work with the "make" that comes with Solaris 7 nor the BSD "make".
36 Perl is also needed to create the man page.
38 If you decide to modify the yacc grammar or lex scanner, then
39 you need "flex" - it cannot be built with vanilla "lex" -
40 and either "bison" or the Berkeley "yacc". Your flex
41 version must be 2.5.1 or greater. Check this with 'flex -V'.
43 You must therefore install Perl, GNU "make", "flex", and either "bison" or
44 Berkeley "yacc" on systems that lack them.
46 Full installation instructions can be found in the INSTALL file.
48 See also the appropriate README.<OS> files for OS-specific installation
54 In order to capture packets from the network, you need to be running
55 as root, or have access to the appropriate entry under /dev if your
56 system is so inclined (BSD-derived systems and Solaris typically fall
57 into this category. Although it might be tempting to make the
58 Ethereal executable setuid root, please don't - alpha code is by nature
59 not very robust, and liable to contain security holes.
61 Please consult the man page for a description of each command-line
62 option and interface feature.
68 The wiretap library is a packet-capture library currently under
69 development parallel to ethereal. In the future it is hoped that
70 wiretap will have more features than libpcap, but wiretap is still in
71 its infancy. However, wiretap is used in ethereal for its ability
72 to read multiple file types. You can read the following file
73 formats, and create display filters for them as well:
75 libpcap, Sniffer (uncompresed), NetXray, Sniffer Pro, snoop,
76 Shomiti, LANalyzer, Network Monitor, iptrace 2.0 (AIX), RADCOM's
77 WAN/LAN Analyzer, and Lucent/Ascend access products.
79 Although Ethereal can read AIX iptrace files, the documentation on
80 AIX's iptrace packet-trace command is sparse. The 'iptrace' command
81 starts a daemon which you must kill in order to stop the trace. Through
82 experimentation it appears that sending a HUP signal to that iptrace
83 daemon causes a graceful shutdown and a complete packet is written
84 to the trace file. If a partial packet is saved at the end, Ethereal
85 will complain when reading that file, but you will be able to read all
86 other packets. If this occurs, please let the Ethereal developers know
87 at ethereal-dev@zing.org, and be sure to send us a copy of that trace
88 file if it's small and contains non-sensitive data.
90 Support for Lucent/Ascend products is limited to the debug trace output
91 generated by the MAX and Pipline series of products. Ethereal can read
92 the output of the "wandsession" "wandisplay", "wannext", and "wdd"
93 commands. For detailed information on use of these commands, please refer
96 "wandsession", "wandisplay", and "wannext" on the Pipeline series:
97 http://aos.ascend.com/aos:/gennavviewer.html?doc_id=0900253d80006c79
99 "wandsession", "wandisplay", and "wannext" on the MAX series:
100 http://aos.ascend.com/aos:/gennavviewer.html?doc_id=0900253d80006972
102 "wdd" on the Pipeline series:
103 http://aos.ascend.com/aos:/gennavviewer.html?doc_id=0900253d80006877
105 To use these commands in conjunction with Ethereal, you must capture the
106 trace output to a file on disk. An easy way of doing this under Unix is
107 to run "telnet <ascend> | tee <outfile>".
112 If your operating system includes IPv6 support, ethereal will attempt to
113 use reverse name resolution capabilities when decoding IPv6 packets. If
114 you want to turn off name resolution while using ethereal, start ethereal
115 with the "-n" option. If you would like to compile ethereal without
116 support for IPv6 name resolution, use the "--disable-ipv6" option with
117 "./configure". If you compile ethereal without IPv6 name resolution,
118 you will still be able to decode IPv6 packets, but you'll only see IPv6
119 addresses, not host names.
121 The "Follow TCP Stream" feature only supports TCP over IPv4. Support for TCP
122 over IPv6 is planned.
127 Ethereal can do some basic decoding of SNMP packets, but it relies on an
128 external SNMP library to do this. You can use either the UCD or the CMU
129 SNMP libraries. The configure script will automatically determine which
130 library you have on your system and will use it. If you have an SNMP
131 library but _do not_ want to have ethereal use it, you can run configure
132 with the "--disable-snmp" option. No SNMP support will be compiled into
133 ethereal with this option.
138 Ethereal is still under constant development, so it is possible that you will
139 encounter a bug while using it. Please report bugs to ethereal-dev@zing.org.
142 1) Operating System and version
143 2) Version of GTK+ (the command 'gtk-config --version' will tell you)
144 3) The command you used to invoke Ethereal
146 If the bug is produced by a particular trace file, please be sure to send
147 a trace file along with your bug description. Please don't send a trace file
148 greather than 1 MB when compressed. If the trace file contains sensitive
149 information (e.g., passwords), then please do not send it.
151 If Ethereal died on you with a 'segmentation violation', you can help the
152 developers a lot if you have a debugger installed. A stack trace can be
153 obtained by using your debugger ('gdb' in this example), the ethereal binary,
154 and the resulting core file. Here's an example of how to use the gdb
155 command 'backtrace' to do so.
159 ..... prints the stack trace
166 There is no warranty, expressed or implied, associated with this product.
167 Use at your own risk.
170 Gerald Combs <gerald@zing.org>
171 Gilbert Ramirez <gram@xiexie.org>