Getting Started with Ethereal

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In order to use Ethereal you must first acquire Ethereal and install it. If you are running a Linux distribution it is likely that your distribution shipped with Ethereal. If you are running Windows or some version of UNIX (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc) you will have to download Ethereal and install it.

You can download binary packages for Ethereal from the Ethereal website at www.ethereal.com. If there are no binary packets there for your platform, if they are not up to date, or compiled without options you need, you may download the source code from the Ethereal website and compile Ethereal yourself. Installing Ethereal is covered in detail in Chapter 3.

You may also wish to download the bgp.pcap.gz capture at www.ethereal.com/sample/bgp.pcap.gz, as it is used in many examples in this chapter. You can follow along through the examples with your own copy of Ethereal. Once you have installed Ethereal on the computer you wish to capture with, execute at the command line:

ethereal.

To launch Ethereal on Windows, select Start | Programs | Ethereal | Ethereal. The Main Window of the Ethereal application will now be displayed.

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