Wireshark

What is Wireshark? To answer this it is best to quote the description from the Ethereal website.

Wireshark is a free network protocol analyzer for Unix and Windows. It allows you to examine data from a live network or from a capture file on disk. You can interactively browse the capture data, viewing summary and detail information for each packet. Wireshark has several powerful features, including a rich display filter language and the ability to view the reconstructed stream of a TCP session.

Wireshark supports an enormous amount of protocols, but there are still a number of obscure protocols that aren't used that often. But the users of those protocols would still be helped a lot if Wireshark supports those protocols, and so i started writing several Wireshark plugins.

News

2006-08-05 - Version 0.99.2 of Wireshark is released.

Version 0.99.2 of Wireshark is released, you can download it at http://www.wireshark.org/download.html

2006-07-08 - Ethereal is now Wireshark

The Ethereal network analyzer is now renamed to Wireshark. For more information on this see the Wireshark homepage at http://www.wireshark.org.

2004-09-01 - Ethereal Artnet plugin update

The Artnet Plugin now displays DMX values in a beter to read form. Via the preferences dialog the number of columns, and display type (hexadecimal, decimal or procent) can be changed.

Wireshark Plugins

ACN

ACN is a protocol suit to control theater equipment, like lighting. ACN is currently under development and so the Wireshark plugin will all so stay under development for that time.

Art-Net

Art-Net is a protocol used, for example, for things like theaters to transport lighting data over Ethernet. The protocol is designed by Artistic Licence and put into the public domain. The plugin supports all documented packets, but there are some undocumented packets that still have to be added (when I get the needed information).

RTNET

RTNET is a protocol for realtime Ethernet communication. It uses RTAI/Linux to provide true hard-realtime communication. To get a feeling on what RT-Net looks like you can download this tcpdump file and open it in Ethereal. For more information see the RTNET Homepage and the RTAI Homepage.

Screenshots

Below, some screenshots of Wireshark in action (click on the images to get a full size version).

The Art-Net plugin

The Art-Net Preferences

The RTNET plugin

Downloads

For installation problems please see the Wireshark and/or Winpcap FAQ's.

Wireshark 0.99.2 source: http://www.wireshark.org/download/src/wireshark-0.99.2.tar.gz
Wireshark 0.99.2 WIN32 binary: http://www.winpcap.org/install/bin/wireshark-setup-0.99.2.exe

References

Wireshark : http://www.wireshark.org
Winpcap : http://www.winpcap.org/
Artistic Licence : http://www.artisticlicence.com
Art-Net (and other lighting topics) discussion board : http://www.artisticlicence.com/cgi-bin/dcforum/dcboard.cgi
RTNET homepage: http://www.rts.uni-hannover.de/rtnet/