Chapter 4: Using Ethereal

 < Day Day Up > 



Introduction

Ethereal is an invaluable tool for providing insight into what is really happening on your network. This kind of insight is useful when implementing protocols, debugging network applications, testing networks, or trying to debug live networks. In almost any situation that involves interaction with the network at a technical level you can enhance your understanding of your problem by using Ethereal to see what is really going on.

Ethereal is also an excellent pedagogical aid. Being able to see and analyze actual network traffic is extremely instructive. It’s one thing to read about the functioning of a protocol, it’s quite another to be able to watch it in action and explore how it’s really operating

This chapter covers the main components of the Ethereal Graphical User Interface (GUI). These parts are the Main Window and it’s subcomponents the Menu Bar, Tool Bar, Summary Window, Protocol Tree Window, Data View Window, Filter Bar, and Information field. This chapter will also cover use of the context-sensitive pop-up windows available in the Summary Window, Protocol Tree Window, and Data View Window, and will also explain the various dialog boxes that are launched by the menus and toolbars.

You will learn how to perform basic tasks in Ethereal such as capturing network traffic, loading and saving capture files, performing basic filtering, printing packets, and using some of the more involved tools provided by Ethereal. Examples have been provided to show you step-by-step how some of the less obvious areas of Ethereal work.

All of the screenshots for this chapter were taken on Linux, and so they may look slightly different in terms of fonts or window decorations than the screenshots in some of the other chapters in this book, which were taken on Windows.



 < Day Day Up > 



Ethereal Packet Sniffing
Ethereal Packet Sniffing (Syngress)
ISBN: 1932266828
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 105
Authors: Syngress

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net