forked from osmocom/wireshark
210 lines
8.3 KiB
Plaintext
210 lines
8.3 KiB
Plaintext
General Information
|
|
------- -----------
|
|
|
|
Ethereal is a network traffic analyzer, or "sniffer", for Unix and
|
|
Unix-like operating systems. It uses 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
|
|
|
|
Interesting and exotic packet traces can be found at
|
|
|
|
http://ethereal.zing.org/~gram/sample.html
|
|
|
|
|
|
Installation
|
|
------------
|
|
|
|
Ethereal is known to compile and run on the following systems:
|
|
|
|
- Linux (2.0.x, 2.1.x, 2.2.x)
|
|
- Solaris (2.5.1, 2.6)
|
|
- FreeBSD (2.2.5, 2.2.6)
|
|
- Sequent PTX v4.4.5 (Nick Williams <njw@sequent.com>)
|
|
- Tru64 UNIX (formerly Digital UNIX) (3.2, 4.0)
|
|
- Irix (version?)
|
|
- AIX (4.3.2, with a bit of work)
|
|
|
|
It should run on other systems without too much trouble.
|
|
|
|
NOTE: the Makefile appears to depend on GNU "make"; it doesn't appear to
|
|
work with the "make" that comes with Solaris 7 nor the BSD "make".
|
|
Perl is also needed to create the man page.
|
|
|
|
If you decide to modify the yacc grammar or lex scanner, then
|
|
you need "flex" - it cannot be built with vanilla "lex" -
|
|
and either "bison" or the Berkeley "yacc". Your flex
|
|
version must be 2.5.1 or greater. Check this with 'flex -V'.
|
|
|
|
You must therefore install Perl, GNU "make", "flex", and either "bison" or
|
|
Berkeley "yacc" on systems that lack them.
|
|
|
|
Full installation instructions can be found in the INSTALL file.
|
|
|
|
See also the appropriate README.<OS> files for OS-specific installation
|
|
instructions.
|
|
|
|
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. However, wiretap is used in ethereal for its ability
|
|
to read multiple file types. You can read the following file
|
|
formats, and create display filters for them as well:
|
|
|
|
libpcap (tcpdump -w), Sniffer (uncompressed), NetXray, Sniffer Pro,
|
|
snoop, Shomiti, LANalyzer, Network Monitor, AIX's iptrace,
|
|
RADCOM's WAN/LAN Analyzer, Lucent/Ascend access products, HP-UX's nettl,
|
|
and Toshiba's ISDN routers.
|
|
|
|
In addition, it can read gzipped versions of any of these files,
|
|
automatically, if you have the zlib library available when compiling
|
|
Ethereal. Ethereal needs a modern version of zlib to be able to use
|
|
zlib to read gzipped files; version 1.1.3 is known to work. Versions
|
|
prior to 1.0.9 are missing some functions that Ethereal needs and won't
|
|
work. "./configure" should detect if you have the proper zlib version
|
|
available and, if you don't, should disable zlib support. You can always
|
|
use "./configure --disable-zlib" to explicitly disable zlib support.
|
|
|
|
Although Ethereal can read AIX iptrace files, the documentation on
|
|
AIX's iptrace packet-trace command is sparse. The 'iptrace' command
|
|
starts a daemon which you must kill in order to stop the trace. Through
|
|
experimentation it appears that sending a HUP signal to that iptrace
|
|
daemon causes a graceful shutdown and a complete packet is written
|
|
to the trace file. If a partial packet is saved at the end, Ethereal
|
|
will complain when reading that file, but you will be able to read all
|
|
other packets. If this occurs, please let the Ethereal developers know
|
|
at ethereal-dev@zing.org, and be sure to send us a copy of that trace
|
|
file if it's small and contains non-sensitive data.
|
|
|
|
Support for Lucent/Ascend products is limited to the debug trace output
|
|
generated by the MAX and Pipline series of products. Ethereal can read
|
|
the output of the "wandsession" "wandisplay", "wannext", and "wdd"
|
|
commands. For detailed information on use of these commands, please refer
|
|
the following pages:
|
|
|
|
"wandsession", "wandisplay", and "wannext" on the Pipeline series:
|
|
http://aos.ascend.com/aos:/gennavviewer.html?doc_id=0900253d80006c79
|
|
|
|
"wandsession", "wandisplay", and "wannext" on the MAX series:
|
|
http://aos.ascend.com/aos:/gennavviewer.html?doc_id=0900253d80006972
|
|
|
|
"wdd" on the Pipeline series:
|
|
http://aos.ascend.com/aos:/gennavviewer.html?doc_id=0900253d80006877
|
|
|
|
Ethereal can also read dump trace output from the Toshiba "Compact Router"
|
|
line of ISDN routers (TR-600 and TR-650). You can telnet to the router
|
|
and start a dump session with "snoop dump".
|
|
|
|
To use the Lucent/Ascend and Toshiba traces with Ethereal, you must capture
|
|
the trace output to a file on disk. The trace is happening inside the router
|
|
and the router has no way of saving the trace to a file for you.
|
|
An easy way of doing this under Unix is to run "telnet <ascend> | tee <outfile>".
|
|
Or, if your system has the "script" command installed, you can save
|
|
a shell session, including telnet to a file. For example, to a file named
|
|
tracefile.out:
|
|
|
|
$ script tracefile.out
|
|
Script started on <date/time>
|
|
$ telnet router
|
|
..... do your trace, then exit from the router's telnet session.
|
|
$ exit
|
|
Script done on <date/time>
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
IPv6
|
|
----
|
|
If your operating system includes IPv6 support, ethereal will attempt to
|
|
use reverse name resolution capabilities when decoding IPv6 packets. If
|
|
you want to turn off name resolution while using ethereal, start ethereal
|
|
with the "-n" option. If you would like to compile ethereal without
|
|
support for IPv6 name resolution, use the "--disable-ipv6" option with
|
|
"./configure". If you compile ethereal without IPv6 name resolution,
|
|
you will still be able to decode IPv6 packets, but you'll only see IPv6
|
|
addresses, not host names.
|
|
|
|
The "Follow TCP Stream" feature only supports TCP over IPv4. Support for TCP
|
|
over IPv6 is planned.
|
|
|
|
|
|
SNMP
|
|
----
|
|
Ethereal can do some basic decoding of SNMP packets, but it relies on an
|
|
external SNMP library to do this. You can use either the UCD or the CMU
|
|
SNMP libraries. The configure script will automatically determine which
|
|
library you have on your system and will use it. If you have an SNMP
|
|
library but _do not_ want to have ethereal use it, you can run configure
|
|
with the "--disable-snmp" option. No SNMP support will be compiled into
|
|
ethereal with this option.
|
|
|
|
|
|
How to Report a Bug
|
|
-------------------
|
|
Ethereal is still under constant development, so it is possible that you will
|
|
encounter a bug while using it. Please report bugs to ethereal-dev@zing.org.
|
|
Be sure you tell us:
|
|
|
|
1) Operating System and version (the command 'uname -sr' may
|
|
tell you this, although on Linux systems it will probably
|
|
tell you only the version number of the Linux kernel, not of
|
|
the distribution as a whole; on Linux systems, please tell us
|
|
both the version number of the kernel, and which version of
|
|
which distribution you're running)
|
|
2) Version of GTK+ (the command 'gtk-config --version' will tell you)
|
|
3) Version of Ethereal (the command 'ethereal -v' will tell you,
|
|
unless the bug is so severe as to prevent that from working,
|
|
and should also tell you the versions of libraries with which
|
|
it was built)
|
|
4) The command you used to invoke Ethereal, and the sequence of
|
|
operations you performed that caused the bug to appear
|
|
|
|
If the bug is produced by a particular trace file, please be sure to send
|
|
a trace file along with your bug description. Please don't send a trace file
|
|
greater than 1 MB when compressed. If the trace file contains sensitive
|
|
information (e.g., passwords), then please do not send it.
|
|
|
|
If Ethereal died on you with a 'segmentation violation', you can help the
|
|
developers a lot if you have a debugger installed. A stack trace can be
|
|
obtained by using your debugger ('gdb' in this example), the ethereal binary,
|
|
and the resulting core file. Here's an example of how to use the gdb
|
|
command 'backtrace' to do so.
|
|
|
|
$ gdb ethereal core
|
|
(gdb) backtrace
|
|
..... prints the stack trace
|
|
(gdb) quit
|
|
$
|
|
|
|
Disclaimer
|
|
----------
|
|
|
|
There is no warranty, expressed or implied, associated with this product.
|
|
Use at your own risk.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Gerald Combs <gerald@zing.org>
|
|
Gilbert Ramirez <gram@xiexie.org>
|