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1 office 1 General Information
2 ------- -----------
3  
4 Wireshark 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.
7  
8 The Wireshark distribution also comes with TShark, which is a
9 line-oriented sniffer (similar to Sun's snoop, or tcpdump) that uses the
10 same dissection, capture-file reading and writing, and packet filtering
11 code as Wireshark, and with editcap, which is a program to read capture
12 files and write the packets from that capture file, possibly in a
13 different capture file format, and with some packets possibly removed
14 from the capture.
15  
16 The official home of Wireshark is
17  
18 http://www.wireshark.org
19  
20 The latest distribution can be found in the subdirectory
21  
22 http://www.wireshark.org/download
23  
24  
25 Installation
26 ------------
27  
28 Wireshark is known to compile and run on the following systems:
29  
30 - Linux (2.0 and later kernels, various distributions)
31 - Solaris (2.5.1 and later)
32 - FreeBSD (2.2.5 and later)
33 - NetBSD
34 - OpenBSD
35 - OS X (10.2 and later)
36 - HP-UX (10.20, 11.00, 11.11)
37 - Sequent PTX v4.4.5 (Nick Williams <njw@sequent.com>)
38 - Tru64 UNIX (formerly Digital UNIX) (3.2 and later)
39 - Irix (6.5)
40 - AIX (4.3.2, with a bit of work)
41 - Windows (2003, XP, Vista, 7)
42  
43 and possibly on other versions of those OSes. It should run on other
44 Unix-ish systems without too much trouble.
45  
46 If you have an older version of the operating systems listed above, it
47 might be supported by an older version of Wireshark. In particular,
48 Windows 2000 is supported by Wireshark 1.2.x, Windows NT 4.0 is supported by
49 Wireshark 0.99.4, and Windows 95, 98, and ME are supported by Ethereal 0.99.0.
50  
51 NOTE: the Makefile appears to depend on GNU "make"; it doesn't appear to
52 work with the "make" that comes with Solaris 7 nor the BSD "make".
53  
54 Both Perl and Python are needed, the former for building the man pages.
55  
56 If you decide to modify the yacc grammar or lex scanner, then
57 you need "flex" - it cannot be built with vanilla "lex" -
58 and either "bison" or the Berkeley "yacc". Your flex
59 version must be 2.5.1 or greater. Check this with 'flex -V'.
60  
61 You must therefore install Perl, Python, GNU "make", "flex", and either "bison"
62 or Berkeley "yacc" on systems that lack them.
63  
64 Full installation instructions can be found in the INSTALL file.
65  
66 See also the appropriate README.<OS> files for OS-specific installation
67 instructions.
68  
69 Usage
70 -----
71  
72 In order to capture packets from the network, you need to make the
73 dumpcap program set-UID to root, or you need to have access to the
74 appropriate entry under /dev if your system is so inclined (BSD-derived
75 systems, and systems such as Solaris and HP-UX that support DLPI,
76 typically fall into this category). Although it might be tempting to
77 make the Wireshark and TShark executables setuid root, or to run them as
78 root please don't. The capture process has been isolated in dumpcap;
79 this simple program is less likely to contain security holes, and thus
80 safer to run as root.
81  
82 Please consult the man page for a description of each command-line
83 option and interface feature.
84  
85  
86 Multiple File Types
87 -------------------
88  
89 The wiretap library is a packet-capture library currently under
90 development parallel to wireshark. In the future it is hoped that
91 wiretap will have more features than libpcap, but wiretap is still in
92 its infancy. However, wiretap is used in wireshark for its ability
93 to read multiple file types. See the Wireshark man page or the
94 Wireshark User's Guide for a list of supported file formats.
95  
96 In addition, it can read gzipped versions of any of those files
97 automatically, if you have the zlib library available when compiling
98 Wireshark. Wireshark needs a modern version of zlib to be able to use
99 zlib to read gzipped files; version 1.1.3 is known to work. Versions
100 prior to 1.0.9 are missing some functions that Wireshark needs and won't
101 work. "./configure" should detect if you have the proper zlib version
102 available and, if you don't, should disable zlib support. You can always
103 use "./configure --disable-zlib" to explicitly disable zlib support.
104  
105 Although Wireshark can read AIX iptrace files, the documentation on
106 AIX's iptrace packet-trace command is sparse. The 'iptrace' command
107 starts a daemon which you must kill in order to stop the trace. Through
108 experimentation it appears that sending a HUP signal to that iptrace
109 daemon causes a graceful shutdown and a complete packet is written
110 to the trace file. If a partial packet is saved at the end, Wireshark
111 will complain when reading that file, but you will be able to read all
112 other packets. If this occurs, please let the Wireshark developers know
113 at wireshark-dev@wireshark.org, and be sure to send us a copy of that trace
114 file if it's small and contains non-sensitive data.
115  
116 Support for Lucent/Ascend products is limited to the debug trace output
117 generated by the MAX and Pipline series of products. Wireshark can read
118 the output of the "wandsession" "wandisplay", "wannext", and "wdd"
119 commands.
120  
121 Wireshark can also read dump trace output from the Toshiba "Compact Router"
122 line of ISDN routers (TR-600 and TR-650). You can telnet to the router
123 and start a dump session with "snoop dump".
124  
125 CoSine L2 debug output can also be read by Wireshark. To get the L2
126 debug output, get in the diags mode first and then use
127 "create-pkt-log-profile" and "apply-pkt-log-profile" commands under
128 layer-2 category. For more detail how to use these commands, you
129 should examine the help command by "layer-2 create ?" or "layer-2 apply ?".
130  
131 To use the Lucent/Ascend, Toshiba and CoSine traces with Wireshark, you must
132 capture the trace output to a file on disk. The trace is happening inside
133 the router and the router has no way of saving the trace to a file for you.
134 An easy way of doing this under Unix is to run "telnet <ascend> | tee <outfile>".
135 Or, if your system has the "script" command installed, you can save
136 a shell session, including telnet to a file. For example, to a file named
137 tracefile.out:
138  
139 $ script tracefile.out
140 Script started on <date/time>
141 $ telnet router
142 ..... do your trace, then exit from the router's telnet session.
143 $ exit
144 Script done on <date/time>
145  
146  
147  
148 IPv6
149 ----
150 If your operating system includes IPv6 support, wireshark will attempt to
151 use reverse name resolution capabilities when decoding IPv6 packets.
152  
153 If you want to turn off name resolution while using wireshark, start
154 wireshark with the "-n" option to turn off all name resolution (including
155 resolution of MAC addresses and TCP/UDP/SMTP port numbers to names), or
156 with the "-N mt" option to turn off name resolution for all
157 network-layer addresses (IPv4, IPv6, IPX).
158  
159 You can make that the default setting by opening the Preferences dialog
160 box using the Preferences item in the Edit menu, selecting "Name
161 resolution", turning off the appropriate name resolution options,
162 clicking "Save", and clicking "OK".
163  
164 If you would like to compile wireshark without support for IPv6 name
165 resolution, use the "--disable-ipv6" option with "./configure". If you
166 compile wireshark without IPv6 name resolution, you will still be able to
167 decode IPv6 packets, but you'll only see IPv6 addresses, not host names.
168  
169  
170 SNMP
171 ----
172 Wireshark can do some basic decoding of SNMP packets; it can also use
173 the libsmi library to do more sophisticated decoding, by reading MIB
174 files and using the information in those files to display OIDs and
175 variable binding values in a friendlier fashion. The configure script
176 will automatically determine whether you have the libsmi library on
177 your system. If you have the libsmi library but _do not_ want to have
178 Wireshark use it, you can run configure with the "--without-libsmi"
179 option.
180  
181 How to Report a Bug
182 -------------------
183 Wireshark is still under constant development, so it is possible that you will
184 encounter a bug while using it. Please report bugs at http://bugs.wireshark.org.
185 Be sure you enter into the bug:
186  
187 1) the complete build information from the "About Wireshark"
188 item in the Help menu or the output of "wireshark -v" for
189 Wireshark bugs and the output of "tshark -v" for TShark bugs;
190  
191 2) if the bug happened on Linux, the Linux distribution you were
192 using, and the version of that distribution;
193  
194 3) the command you used to invoke Wireshark, if you ran
195 Wireshark from the command line, or TShark, if you ran
196 TShark, and the sequence of operations you performed that
197 caused the bug to appear.
198  
199 If the bug is produced by a particular trace file, please be sure to
200 attach to the bug a trace file along with your bug description. If the
201 trace file contains sensitive information (e.g., passwords), then please
202 do not send it.
203  
204 If Wireshark died on you with a 'segmentation violation', 'bus error',
205 'abort', or other error that produces a UNIX core dump file, you can
206 help the developers a lot if you have a debugger installed. A stack
207 trace can be obtained by using your debugger ('gdb' in this example),
208 the wireshark binary, and the resulting core file. Here's an example of
209 how to use the gdb command 'backtrace' to do so.
210  
211 $ gdb wireshark core
212 (gdb) backtrace
213 ..... prints the stack trace
214 (gdb) quit
215 $
216  
217 The core dump file may be named "wireshark.core" rather than "core" on
218 some platforms (e.g., BSD systems). If you got a core dump with
219 TShark rather than Wireshark, use "tshark" as the first argument to
220 the debugger; the core dump may be named "tshark.core".
221  
222 Disclaimer
223 ----------
224  
225 There is no warranty, expressed or implied, associated with this product.
226 Use at your own risk.
227  
228  
229 Gerald Combs <gerald@wireshark.org>
230 Gilbert Ramirez <gram@alumni.rice.edu>
231 Guy Harris <guy@alum.mit.edu>