1 $Id: README,v 1.36 2000/02/19 22:01:26 guy 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://ethereal.zing.org
22 The latest distribution can be found in the subdirectory
24 http://ethereal.zing.org/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)
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)
39 - Win32 (NT, 98; read-only, no capturing yet)
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 You must therefore install Perl, GNU "make", "flex", and either "bison" or
53 Berkeley "yacc" on systems that lack them.
55 Full installation instructions can be found in the INSTALL file.
57 See also the appropriate README.<OS> files for OS-specific installation
63 In order to capture packets from the network, you need to be running as
64 root, or have access to the appropriate entry under /dev if your system
65 is so inclined (BSD-derived systems, and systems such as Solaris and
66 HP-UX that support DLPI, typically fall into this category). Although
67 it might be tempting to make the Ethereal executable setuid root, please
68 don't - alpha code is by nature not very robust, and liable to contain
71 Please consult the man page for a description of each command-line
72 option and interface feature.
78 The wiretap library is a packet-capture library currently under
79 development parallel to ethereal. In the future it is hoped that
80 wiretap will have more features than libpcap, but wiretap is still in
81 its infancy. However, wiretap is used in ethereal for its ability
82 to read multiple file types. You can read the following file
83 formats, and create display filters for them as well:
85 libpcap (tcpdump -w), Sniffer (uncompressed), NetXray, Sniffer Pro,
86 snoop, Shomiti, LANalyzer, Microsoft Network Monitor, AIX's iptrace,
87 RADCOM's WAN/LAN Analyzer, Lucent/Ascend access products, HP-UX's nettl,
88 Toshiba's ISDN routers, and the ISDN4BSD "i4btrace" utility.
90 In addition, it can read gzipped versions of any of these files,
91 automatically, if you have the zlib library available when compiling
92 Ethereal. Ethereal needs a modern version of zlib to be able to use
93 zlib to read gzipped files; version 1.1.3 is known to work. Versions
94 prior to 1.0.9 are missing some functions that Ethereal needs and won't
95 work. "./configure" should detect if you have the proper zlib version
96 available and, if you don't, should disable zlib support. You can always
97 use "./configure --disable-zlib" to explicitly disable zlib support.
99 Although Ethereal can read AIX iptrace files, the documentation on
100 AIX's iptrace packet-trace command is sparse. The 'iptrace' command
101 starts a daemon which you must kill in order to stop the trace. Through
102 experimentation it appears that sending a HUP signal to that iptrace
103 daemon causes a graceful shutdown and a complete packet is written
104 to the trace file. If a partial packet is saved at the end, Ethereal
105 will complain when reading that file, but you will be able to read all
106 other packets. If this occurs, please let the Ethereal developers know
107 at ethereal-dev@zing.org, and be sure to send us a copy of that trace
108 file if it's small and contains non-sensitive data.
110 Support for Lucent/Ascend products is limited to the debug trace output
111 generated by the MAX and Pipline series of products. Ethereal can read
112 the output of the "wandsession" "wandisplay", "wannext", and "wdd"
113 commands. For detailed information on use of these commands, please refer
116 "wandsession", "wandisplay", and "wannext" on the Pipeline series:
117 http://aos.ascend.com/aos:/gennavviewer.html?doc_id=0900253d80006c79
119 "wandsession", "wandisplay", and "wannext" on the MAX series:
120 http://aos.ascend.com/aos:/gennavviewer.html?doc_id=0900253d80006972
122 "wdd" on the Pipeline series:
123 http://aos.ascend.com/aos:/gennavviewer.html?doc_id=0900253d80006877
125 Ethereal can also read dump trace output from the Toshiba "Compact Router"
126 line of ISDN routers (TR-600 and TR-650). You can telnet to the router
127 and start a dump session with "snoop dump".
129 To use the Lucent/Ascend and Toshiba traces with Ethereal, you must capture
130 the trace output to a file on disk. The trace is happening inside the router
131 and the router has no way of saving the trace to a file for you.
132 An easy way of doing this under Unix is to run "telnet <ascend> | tee <outfile>".
133 Or, if your system has the "script" command installed, you can save
134 a shell session, including telnet to a file. For example, to a file named
137 $ script tracefile.out
138 Script started on <date/time>
140 ..... do your trace, then exit from the router's telnet session.
142 Script done on <date/time>
148 If your operating system includes IPv6 support, ethereal will attempt to
149 use reverse name resolution capabilities when decoding IPv6 packets. If
150 you want to turn off name resolution while using ethereal, start ethereal
151 with the "-n" option. If you would like to compile ethereal without
152 support for IPv6 name resolution, use the "--disable-ipv6" option with
153 "./configure". If you compile ethereal without IPv6 name resolution,
154 you will still be able to decode IPv6 packets, but you'll only see IPv6
155 addresses, not host names.
157 The "Follow TCP Stream" feature only supports TCP over IPv4. Support for TCP
158 over IPv6 is planned.
163 Ethereal can do some basic decoding of SNMP packets; it can also use an
164 external SNMP library to do more sophisticated decoding.. The configure
165 script will automatically determine which library you have on your
166 system and will use it. If you have an SNMP library but _do not_ want
167 to have ethereal use it, you can run configure with the "--disable-snmp"
173 Ethereal is still under constant development, so it is possible that you will
174 encounter a bug while using it. Please report bugs to ethereal-dev@zing.org.
177 1) Operating System and version (the command 'uname -sr' may
178 tell you this, although on Linux systems it will probably
179 tell you only the version number of the Linux kernel, not of
180 the distribution as a whole; on Linux systems, please tell us
181 both the version number of the kernel, and which version of
182 which distribution you're running)
183 2) Version of GTK+ (the command 'gtk-config --version' will tell you)
184 3) Version of Ethereal (the command 'ethereal -v' will tell you,
185 unless the bug is so severe as to prevent that from working,
186 and should also tell you the versions of libraries with which
188 4) The command you used to invoke Ethereal, and the sequence of
189 operations you performed that caused the bug to appear
191 If the bug is produced by a particular trace file, please be sure to send
192 a trace file along with your bug description. Please don't send a trace file
193 greater than 1 MB when compressed. If the trace file contains sensitive
194 information (e.g., passwords), then please do not send it.
196 If Ethereal died on you with a 'segmentation violation', you can help the
197 developers a lot if you have a debugger installed. A stack trace can be
198 obtained by using your debugger ('gdb' in this example), the ethereal binary,
199 and the resulting core file. Here's an example of how to use the gdb
200 command 'backtrace' to do so.
204 ..... prints the stack trace
211 There is no warranty, expressed or implied, associated with this product.
212 Use at your own risk.
215 Gerald Combs <gerald@zing.org>
216 Gilbert Ramirez <gram@xiexie.org>