Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] QUESTIONS ABOUT ETHEREAL

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From: Ian Schorr <spamcontrol2@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 14:04:26 -0400
Hi Georgina:

See replies below:

gina olivares wrote:



*/gina olivares <geanolre@xxxxxxxxx>/* wrote: Hi, my name is Georgina, and i´m interested about software ETHEREAL I have some doubts about it.

    First, I´d like to know if I can use it on a TCP/IP network??


It depends on what you mean, but the simple answer to your question is "yes".

    Second, if I need a special language to program it or make
    changes, and wich is this?

Again, it depends on what you're trying to do. If you mean "make changes to the program to enhance, change, or add features", then Ethereal is written in C, with GTK+ and libpcap/winpcap.

I suspect you somehow mean to control the program, and the answer is no. See the Ethereal user guide at http://www.ethereal.com/docs/user-guide/ or the Man page at http://www.ethereal.com/ethereal.1.html for more information on usage.

Can you elaborate on what you mean here?

    Third, if it has a kind of alarm, as pager, mail, or something.?

Ethereal does not do real-time monitoring per se, as you might be used to with Sniffer, Observer, Agilent, or some of the RMON-monitoring tools (Netscout, etc). It doesn't have any sort of built-in functionality to generate "alarms" based on certain events.

However, using scripts and tethereal (the text, command-line-based version of Ethereal), you can generate a wide variety of reports, and generate SNMP traps, based on this information.

This sort of thing would require you to write external scripts and use other software (like "snmp") to signal that an event has occurred. You'd have to do it yourself - this sort of functionality isn't part of Ethereal, and to my knowledge no one has distributed sample scripts/etc for general use.

    Fourth, if this software graphs in terms of days, weeks, months...?

Ethereal has some fairly powerful post-capture graphing tools. However, for real-time graphing you could, again, use scripts and tethereal, which you can use to generate some fairly powerful statistics as well. You could monitor virtually forever.

    Fifth Which is the latest version of this program, and what kind
    of services does it works (DNS, HTTP, etc)?

Have you looked at the Ethereal web page (www.ethereal.com)? The current version is 0.9.13.

Ethereal can decode/analyze literally hundreds of protocols, including DNS and HTTP.

    The last one, i´d like to know how do you manage the licenses, the
    way i need to buy it, i mean, if i need a license for each
    computer, or i need just one??

Ethereal is Open Source Software and is distributed under the GNU public license (GPL). There's no buying involved.

Incidentally, are you possibly thinking of the Etherpeek software, by Wildpackets (www.wildpackets.com)?