AzPHP User's Group

Ethereal is a sniffer, a tool for troubleshooting, analysis, and (surprise) development of software.

While ethereal is typically thought of as a tool for networking professionals, and it surely is great at those tasks, it can also be used by coders for looking under the hood or "on the wire".

Paul Yurt co-founder and developer of MasterMOZ a patent pending social web directory, goes into a deep exploration of Ethereal now called Wireshark.

In some settings, Yurt explains how it is not easy to see what is occurring "on the wire" or in a black box, and he explains such situations are where sniffing can be a great asset.

Wireshark is a great sniffer and can analyze many protocols with its plugin architecture. Paul explores the various protocols and the vast number of plug-ins Ethereal supports.

The presentation includes discussion of how a developer can use such a networking tool for coding, software testing, and other forms of system developing and troubleshooting, in addition to, or as opposed to other tools.

While Wireshark has all of the standard features of a protocol analyzer, it also includes features not seen in any other tool of it's class. The main reason Ethereal became so powerful is the fact that is was developed in the open source environment where literally hundreds of developers have contributed to make it what it is.

Wireshark's open source license has allowed a great number of experts to add enhancements over time making Ethereal one of the most advanced & feature rich protocol analyzers, file readers, and general purpose swiss army knives. No coder or developer should be without Wireshark in their bag of tricks.

Best of all, Wireshark runs on Unix, Linux, and Windows and no extra hardware is required to make it part of a toolbox or portfolio.

Oh and best yet, Wireshark is free, completely free, as it is open source licensed and distributed on soureforge.

Thre is an interesting story about the name Etereal being changed to Wireshark. The reason is that Gerald Combs, the founder of the Ethereal project, changed jobs and had to leave the Ethereal trademark behind. He is continuing to work on Ethereal as Wireshark at http://wireshark.org

As as Wireshark FaQ states: "Wireshark is almost (but not quite) a fork. Normally a "fork" of an open source project results in two names, web sites, development teams, support infrastructures, etc. This is the case with Wireshark except for one notable exception -- every member of the core development team is now working on Wireshark. As far as anyone knows, there has been no active development on Ethereal since the name change. Several parts of the Ethereal web site (such as the mailing lists, source code repository, and build farm) have gone offline."

You can download Wireshark at wireshark and if you are a traditionalist Ethereal downloads here.

About Paul Yurt. Paul is a CoDeveloper of MasterMOZ a new type of web directory written in PHP. MasterMOZ combines social networking with web directory to create a unique experience for users and Members. While MasterMOZ is cool, it's also new, in beta, and does not have any AJAX functionality. Anyone interested in helping make AJAX happen on the site or others should contact Paul via who is a member of the AZPHP User Group.