TechBeta

Gerald Combs, the creator of Ethereal, has initiated the Wireshark network protocol analyzer project, a successor to Ethereal.

Wireshark is one of the world’s foremost network protocol analyzers, and is the standard in many parts of the industry. Wireshark is used by network professionals around the world for troubleshooting, analysis, software and protocol development, and education. It has all of the standard features you would expect in a protocol analyzer, and several features not seen in any other product. Its open source license allows talented experts in the networking community to add enhancements.

Wireshark has a rich feature set which includes the following:
• Standard three-pane packet browser
• Multi-platform: Runs on Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and many others
• Multi-interface: Along with a standard GUI, Wireshark includes TShark, a text-mode analyzer which is useful for remote capture, analysis, and scripting
• The most powerful display filters in the industry
• VoIP analysis
• Live capture and offline analysis are supported

• Read/write many different capture file formats: tcpdump (libpcap), NAI’s Sniffer (compressed and uncompressed), Sniffer Pro, NetXray, Sun snoop and atmsnoop, Shomiti/Finisar Surveyor, AIX’s iptrace, Microsoft’s Network Monitor, Novell’s LANalyzer, RADCOM’s WAN/LAN Analyzer, HP-UX nettl, i4btrace from the ISDN4BSD project, Cisco Secure IDS iplog, the pppd log (pppdump-format), the AG Group’s/WildPacket’s EtherPeek/TokenPeek/AiroPeek, Visual Networks’ Visual UpTime and many others

• Capture files compressed with gzip can be decompressed on the fly
• Hundreds of protocols are supported, with more being added all the time
• Coloring rules can be applied to the packet list, which eases analysis

Wireshark is free software

Download: Wireshark 1.0.3 | Wireshark 1.1.1 Development