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", and LANalyzer 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 <gram@verdict.uthscsa.edu>. 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.