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The tool was renamed when version 0.99.1 of Wireshark was released, because Ethereal developer Gerald Combs left Ethereal Software. It was formerly known as Ethereal and is probably known to many administrators by that name. One of these tools is Wireshark, which dates back to 2006.

Ethereal and Wiresharkīecause a command-line interface isn’t everybody’s idea of user friendliness, graphical solutions that also rely on the Libpcap library have been around for some time. Administrators can control Tcpdump’s behavior at the command line by passing in parameters, including the filters to use. These capture filters are based on Libpcap, a C/​C++ library that supports access to the network interface’s link layer. One particularly impressive thing about Tcpdump is its useful collection of filters. The exceptions are Mac OS X and Solaris, where the user only needs access privileges for the network interface card device file.īy default, Tcpdump reads all the data that reached the specified network card across the network and displays it, for example, on the standard output device, or stores it in files that the administrator can evaluate later.

Tcpdump needs direct access to the hardware and thus typically runs with root privileges. A port for Windows exists under the name of WinDump, based on WinPcap. Tcpdump is available for just about any Unix derivative, such as AIX, BSD, Solaris, and is nearly always included in the standard package sources of any version of Linux, if not installed by default. However, it only offers a command-line interface. Tcpdump is a classic tool in the Unix world and is widely used by experts. Then, the software decodes the data and displays the results on screen. To allow this to happen, software continuously grabs all of the data packets and stores them on disk. Despite this, Windows administrators are sometimes wary of deploying open source tools without a graphical user interface.īasically, network analysis software does nothing but record all the traffic on the specified network interface. Linux comes with a lot of useful network analysis tools, many of which provide excellent results that can easily compete with commercial tools.