FACTOID # 158: 84% of people in Finland feel that they are at a low risk of experiencing a burglary - but just look at how many burglaries they have!
 
 Home   Encyclopedia   Statistics   Countries A-Z   Flags   Maps   Education   Forum   FAQ   About 
 
 
 
WHAT'S NEW
RECENT ARTICLES
More Recent Articles »
 

SEARCH ALL

FACTS & STATISTICS    Advanced view

Search encyclopedia, statistics and forums:

 

 

(* = Graphable)

 

 


Encyclopedia > Ethereal (software)
Image:Ethereal icon.png  Ethereal
Ethereal on Windows XP
Ethereal on Windows XP
Maintainer: Ethereal
Latest release: 0.99.0 / April 24, 2006
OS: Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Mac OS X and Windows
Use: network analyzer
License: GNU General Public License
Website: http://www.ethereal.com/

In computing, Ethereal (i-'thir-E-&l) is a protocol analyzer, or "packet sniffer" application, used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and protocol development, and education. It has all of the standard features of a protocol analyzer. Image File history File links Ethereal_icon. ... Image File history File links Download high resolution version (995x786, 54 KB) Ethereal Network Analyzer, under GPL License. ... Software maintenance is one of the activities in software engineering, and is the process of enhancing and optimizing deployed software (software release), as well as remedying defects. ... A software release refers to the creation and availability of a new version of a computer software product. ... April 24 is the 114th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (115th in leap years). ... 2006 (MMVI) is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... An operating system (OS) is a software program that manages the hardware and software resources of a computer. ... Linux (also known as GNU/Linux) is a computer operating system. ... Solaris is a computer operating system developed by Sun Microsystems. ... FreeBSD is a Unix-like free operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through 386BSD and 4. ... NetBSD is a freely redistributable, open source version of the Unix-like BSD computer operating system. ... OpenBSD is a freely available Unix-like computer operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix derivative created at the University of California, Berkeley. ... Mac OS X is a proprietary operating system developed and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. ... ‹ The template below has been proposed for deletion. ... Network analyzer may mean: A packet sniffer, used on a computer data network A category of electronic test equipment used with electrical networks. ... A software license is a legal agreement which may take the form of a proprietary or gratuitous license as well as a memorandum of contract between a producer and a user of computer software. ... The GNU logo Wikisource has original text related to this article: GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a widely-used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project. ... This page as shown in the AOL 9. ... Originally, the word computing was synonymous with counting and calculating, and a science that deals with the original sense of computing mathematical calculations. ... Packet sniffers (also known as network or protocol analyzers or Ethernet sniffers) are computer software (usually) or computer hardware that can intercept and log traffic passing over a digital network or part of a network. ... Application software is a loosely defined subclass of computer software that employs the capabilities of a computer directly to a task that the user wishes to perform. ... A computer network is a system for communication between computers. ... In the field of telecommunications, a communications protocol is the set of standard rules for data representation, signaling, authentication, and error detection required to send information over a communications channel. ...


The functionality Ethereal provides is very similar to tcpdump (c.f.), but it has a GUI front-end, and many more information sorting and filtering options. It allows the user to see all traffic being passed over the network (usually an Ethernet network but support is being added for others) by putting the network card into promiscuous mode. tcpdump is a common computer network debugging tool that runs under the command line. ... GUI can refer to the following: GUI is short for graphical user interface, a term used to describe a type of interface in computing. ... In their most general meanings, the terms front end and back end refer to the initial and the end stages of a process flow. ... Ethernet is large and diverse family of frame-based computer networking technologies for local area networks (LANs). ... Promiscuous mode, in computer related fields, generally refers to the practice of putting a network card into a setting so that it passes all traffic it receives to the CPU rather than just packets addressed to it. ...


Ethereal is released under an open source license, and it runs on most Unix and Unix-compatible systems, including Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Mac OS X and Windows, as it uses the cross-platform GTK+ widget toolkit (although GTK+ only works with X11 on Mac OS X, so the user will need to run an X server such as X11.app). An open-source license is a copyright license for computer software that makes the source code available under terms that allow for modification and royalty-free redistribution. ... Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... Linux (also known as GNU/Linux) is a computer operating system. ... Solaris is a computer operating system developed by Sun Microsystems. ... FreeBSD is a Unix-like free operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through 386BSD and 4. ... NetBSD is a freely redistributable, open source version of the Unix-like BSD computer operating system. ... OpenBSD is a freely available Unix-like computer operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix derivative created at the University of California, Berkeley. ... Mac OS X is a proprietary operating system developed and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. ... ‹ The template below has been proposed for deletion. ... Initially created for the raster graphics editor, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, the GIMP Toolkit—abbreviated, and almost exclusively known, as GTK+—is one of the two most popular widget toolkits for the X Window System for creating graphical user interfaces. ... In computing, the X Window System (commonly X11 or X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays. ... X11. ...


Ethereal is software that "understands" the structure of different network protocols. Thus it's able to display encapsulation and single fields and interpret their meaning. Ethereal doesn't have its own code to capture packets. Ethereal uses Pcap to capture packets, so it can only capture on networks supported by Pcap. pcap is an application programming interface for packet capturing. ...

Contents


Forks

8 June 2006 -- When creator and lead developer Gerald Combs moved to a new job, his former employer, which held the Ethereal trademark, would not come to an agreement allowing him to keep the trademark. He still held the copyright on the Ethereal source code, so he took the the Subversion repository for Ethereal and used it as the basis for the Subversion repository of Wireshark. Because he had no rights to the Ethereal trademark and name, he could not use it with his new project. The trademark holders of Ethereal have not made any statments about Wireshark, and whether Ethereal continues to be developed separate from Wireshark has yet to be seen. June 8 is the 159th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (160th in leap years), with 206 days remaining. ... 2006 (MMVI) is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A trademark or trade mark[1] is a distinctive sign of some kind which is used by a business to uniquely identify itself and its products and services to consumers, and to distinguish the business and its products or services from those of other businesses. ... Subversion is an open source application used for revision control. ... In computing, Wireshark is a protocol analyzer, or packet sniffer application, used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and protocol development, and education. ...


Features

  • Data can be captured "from the wire" from a live network connection or read from a capture file.
  • Live data can be read from Ethernet, FDDI, PPP, Token Ring, IEEE 802.11, Classical IP over ATM, and loopback interfaces (at least on some platforms; not all of those types are supported on all platforms).
  • Captured network data can be browsed via a GUI, or via the TTY-mode "tethereal" program.
  • Captured files can be programmatically edited or converted via command-line switches to the "editcap" program.
  • Display filters can also be used to selectively highlight and color packet summary information.
  • Data display can be refined using a display filter.
  • Hundreds of protocols can be dissected.
  • And more...
  • In the past the Ethereal program could run only if WinPcap was installed on the local machine, now WinPcap is already added to the Ethereal program in a complete package.
  • The terminal (command line) version of the utility is Tethereal, which can be very handy when working on Unix and Unix-like environments (although it's available on Windows as well)

Ethernet is large and diverse family of frame-based computer networking technologies for local area networks (LANs). ... In computer networking, fiber-distributed data interface (FDDI) is a standard for data transmission in a local area network that can extend in range up to 200 km (124 miles). ... In computing, the Point-to-Point Protocol, or PPP, is commonly used to establish a direct connection between two nodes. ... Token-Ring local area network (LAN) technology was developed and promoted by IBM in the early 1980s and standardised as IEEE 802. ... IEEE 802. ... The Internet Protocol (IP) is a data-oriented protocol used for communicating data across a packet-switched internetwork. ... Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is a cell relay network protocol which encodes data traffic into small fixed-sized (53 byte; 48 bytes of data and 5 bytes of header information) cells instead of variable sized packets (sometimes known as frames) as in packet-switched networks (such as the Internet Protocol... A loopback is a communications channel with only one endpoint. ... GUI can refer to the following: GUI is short for graphical user interface, a term used to describe a type of interface in computing. ... A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system. ... In the field of telecommunications, a communications protocol is the set of standard rules for data representation, signaling, authentication, and error detection required to send information over a communications channel. ... Screenshot of a sample Bash session, taken on Gentoo Linux. ... Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. ... ‹ The template below has been proposed for deletion. ...

Security

Capturing raw network traffic from an interface requires special privileges on some platforms. For this reason, Ethereal often runs as root (even on platforms where capturing raw network traffic doesn't require that).


Taking into account the huge number of protocol dissectors, which are called when traffic for their protocol is captured, this can pose a serious security risk given a bug in a dissector. Due to the rather large number of vulnerabilities in the past (of which many even allowed remote code execution) and doubts of developers for better future development, OpenBSD removed Ethereal from its ports tree prior to its 3.6 release. OpenBSD is a freely available Unix-like computer operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix derivative created at the University of California, Berkeley. ...


Author(s)

Out of necessity, Gerald Combs (a computer science graduate of the University of Missouri-Kansas City) started writing the Ethereal code so that he could have a tool to capture and analyze packets; he released the first version around 1998. Pretty soon, this public domain protocol analyzer caught on. As of now there are over 500 contributing authors while Gerald continues to maintain the overall code and issues releases of new versions. The entire list of authors is available from Ethereal's web-site. The University of Missouri-Kansas City (abbreviated UMKC) is an institution of higher learning located in Kansas City, Missouri. ...


External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
Ethereal


 
 

COMMENTARY     


Share your thoughts, questions and commentary here
Your name
Your comments

Want to know more?
Search encyclopedia, statistics and forums:

 


Lesson Plans | Student Area | Student FAQ | Reviews | Press Releases |  Feeds | Contact
The Wikipedia article included on this page is licensed under the GFDL.
Images may be subject to relevant owners' copyright.
All other elements are (c) copyright NationMaster.com 2003-5. All Rights Reserved.
Usage implies agreement with terms, 1022, m