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1 $Id$
3 General Information
4 ------- -----------
6 Wireshark 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 Wireshark distribution also comes with TShark, 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 Wireshark, 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
16 from the capture.
18 The official home of Wireshark is
20 http://www.wireshark.org
22 The latest distribution can be found in the subdirectory
24 http://www.wireshark.org/download
27 Installation
28 ------------
30 Wireshark is known to compile and run on the following systems:
32 - Linux (2.0 and later kernels, various distributions)
33 - Solaris (2.5.1 and later)
34 - FreeBSD (2.2.5 and later)
35 - NetBSD
36 - OpenBSD
37 - Mac OS X (10.2 and later)
38 - HP-UX (10.20, 11.00, 11.11)
39 - Sequent PTX v4.4.5 (Nick Williams <njw@sequent.com>)
40 - Tru64 UNIX (formerly Digital UNIX) (3.2 and later)
41 - Irix (6.5)
42 - AIX (4.3.2, with a bit of work)
43 - Windows (2003, XP, Vista, 7)
45 and possibly on other versions of those OSes. It should run on other
46 Unix-ish systems without too much trouble.
48 If you have an older version of the operating systems listed above, it
49 might be supported by an older version of Wireshark. In particular,
50 Windows 2000 is supported by Wireshark 1.2.x, Windows NT 4.0 is supported by
51 Wireshark 0.99.4, and Windows 95, 98, and ME are supported by Ethereal 0.99.0.
53 NOTE: the Makefile appears to depend on GNU "make"; it doesn't appear to
54 work with the "make" that comes with Solaris 7 nor the BSD "make".
55 Perl is also needed to create the man page.
57 If you decide to modify the yacc grammar or lex scanner, then
58 you need "flex" - it cannot be built with vanilla "lex" -
59 and either "bison" or the Berkeley "yacc". Your flex
60 version must be 2.5.1 or greater. Check this with 'flex -V'.
62 If you decide to modify the NetWare Core Protocol dissector, you
63 will need python, as the data for packet types is stored in a python
64 script, ncp2222.py.
66 You must therefore install Perl, GNU "make", "flex", and either "bison" or
67 Berkeley "yacc" on systems that lack them.
69 Full installation instructions can be found in the INSTALL file.
71 See also the appropriate README.<OS> files for OS-specific installation
72 instructions.
74 Usage
75 -----
77 In order to capture packets from the network, you need to make the
78 dumpcap program set-UID to root, or you need to have access to the
79 appropriate entry under /dev if your system is so inclined (BSD-derived
80 systems, and systems such as Solaris and HP-UX that support DLPI,
81 typically fall into this category). Although it might be tempting to
82 make the Wireshark and TShark executables setuid root, or to run them as
83 root please don't. The capture process has been isolated in dumpcap;
84 this simple program is less likely to contain security holes, and thus
85 safer to run as root.
87 Please consult the man page for a description of each command-line
88 option and interface feature.
91 Multiple File Types
92 -------------------
94 The wiretap library is a packet-capture library currently under
95 development parallel to wireshark. In the future it is hoped that
96 wiretap will have more features than libpcap, but wiretap is still in
97 its infancy. However, wiretap is used in wireshark for its ability
98 to read multiple file types. See the Wireshark man page or the
99 Wireshark User's Guide for a list of supported file formats.
101 In addition, it can read gzipped versions of any of those files
102 automatically, if you have the zlib library available when compiling
103 Wireshark. Wireshark needs a modern version of zlib to be able to use
104 zlib to read gzipped files; version 1.1.3 is known to work. Versions
105 prior to 1.0.9 are missing some functions that Wireshark needs and won't
106 work. "./configure" should detect if you have the proper zlib version
107 available and, if you don't, should disable zlib support. You can always
108 use "./configure --disable-zlib" to explicitly disable zlib support.
110 Although Wireshark can read AIX iptrace files, the documentation on
111 AIX's iptrace packet-trace command is sparse. The 'iptrace' command
112 starts a daemon which you must kill in order to stop the trace. Through
113 experimentation it appears that sending a HUP signal to that iptrace
114 daemon causes a graceful shutdown and a complete packet is written
115 to the trace file. If a partial packet is saved at the end, Wireshark
116 will complain when reading that file, but you will be able to read all
117 other packets. If this occurs, please let the Wireshark developers know
118 at wireshark-dev@wireshark.org, and be sure to send us a copy of that trace
119 file if it's small and contains non-sensitive data.
121 Support for Lucent/Ascend products is limited to the debug trace output
122 generated by the MAX and Pipline series of products. Wireshark can read
123 the output of the "wandsession" "wandisplay", "wannext", and "wdd"
124 commands.
126 Wireshark can also read dump trace output from the Toshiba "Compact Router"
127 line of ISDN routers (TR-600 and TR-650). You can telnet to the router
128 and start a dump session with "snoop dump".
130 CoSine L2 debug output can also be read by Wireshark. To get the L2
131 debug output, get in the diags mode first and then use
132 "create-pkt-log-profile" and "apply-pkt-log-profile" commands under
133 layer-2 category. For more detail how to use these commands, you
134 should examine the help command by "layer-2 create ?" or "layer-2 apply ?".
136 To use the Lucent/Ascend, Toshiba and CoSine traces with Wireshark, you must
137 capture the trace output to a file on disk. The trace is happening inside
138 the router and the router has no way of saving the trace to a file for you.
139 An easy way of doing this under Unix is to run "telnet <ascend> | tee <outfile>".
140 Or, if your system has the "script" command installed, you can save
141 a shell session, including telnet to a file. For example, to a file named
142 tracefile.out:
144 $ script tracefile.out
145 Script started on <date/time>
146 $ telnet router
147 ..... do your trace, then exit from the router's telnet session.
148 $ exit
149 Script done on <date/time>
153 IPv6
154 ----
155 If your operating system includes IPv6 support, wireshark will attempt to
156 use reverse name resolution capabilities when decoding IPv6 packets.
158 If you want to turn off name resolution while using wireshark, start
159 wireshark with the "-n" option to turn off all name resolution (including
160 resolution of MAC addresses and TCP/UDP/SMTP port numbers to names), or
161 with the "-N mt" option to turn off name resolution for all
162 network-layer addresses (IPv4, IPv6, IPX).
164 You can make that the default setting by opening the Preferences dialog
165 box using the Preferences item in the Edit menu, selecting "Name
166 resolution", turning off the appropriate name resolution options,
167 clicking "Save", and clicking "OK".
169 If you would like to compile wireshark without support for IPv6 name
170 resolution, use the "--disable-ipv6" option with "./configure". If you
171 compile wireshark without IPv6 name resolution, you will still be able to
172 decode IPv6 packets, but you'll only see IPv6 addresses, not host names.
175 SNMP
176 ----
177 Wireshark can do some basic decoding of SNMP packets; it can also use
178 the libsmi library to do more sophisticated decoding, by reading MIB
179 files and using the information in those files to display OIDs and
180 variable binding values in a friendlier fashion. The configure script
181 will automatically determine whether you have the libsmi library on
182 your system. If you have the libsmi library but _do not_ want to have
183 Wireshark use it, you can run configure with the "--without-libsmi"
184 option.
186 How to Report a Bug
187 -------------------
188 Wireshark is still under constant development, so it is possible that you will
189 encounter a bug while using it. Please report bugs at http://bugs.wireshark.org.
190 Be sure you enter into the bug:
192 1) the complete build information from the "About Wireshark"
193 item in the Help menu or the output of "wireshark -v" for
194 Wireshark bugs and the output of "tshark -v" for TShark bugs;
196 2) if the bug happened on Linux, the Linux distribution you were
197 using, and the version of that distribution;
199 3) the command you used to invoke Wireshark, if you ran
200 Wireshark from the command line, or TShark, if you ran
201 TShark, and the sequence of operations you performed that
202 caused the bug to appear.
204 If the bug is produced by a particular trace file, please be sure to
205 attach to the bug a trace file along with your bug description. If the
206 trace file contains sensitive information (e.g., passwords), then please
207 do not send it.
209 If Wireshark died on you with a 'segmentation violation', 'bus error',
210 'abort', or other error that produces a UNIX core dump file, you can
211 help the developers a lot if you have a debugger installed. A stack
212 trace can be obtained by using your debugger ('gdb' in this example),
213 the wireshark binary, and the resulting core file. Here's an example of
214 how to use the gdb command 'backtrace' to do so.
216 $ gdb wireshark core
217 (gdb) backtrace
218 ..... prints the stack trace
219 (gdb) quit
220 $
222 The core dump file may be named "wireshark.core" rather than "core" on
223 some platforms (e.g., BSD systems). If you got a core dump with
224 TShark rather than Wireshark, use "tshark" as the first argument to
225 the debugger; the core dump may be named "tshark.core".
227 Disclaimer
228 ----------
230 There is no warranty, expressed or implied, associated with this product.
231 Use at your own risk.
234 Gerald Combs <gerald@wireshark.org>
235 Gilbert Ramirez <gram@alumni.rice.edu>
236 Guy Harris <guy@alum.mit.edu>