If you have problems, or need help with Ethereal, there are several places that may be of interest to you (well, beside this guide of course).
You will find lot's of useful information on the Ethereal homepage at http://www.ethereal.com.
The Ethereal Wiki at http://wiki.ethereal.com provides a wide range of information related to Ethereal and packet capturing in general. You will find a lot of information not part of this developer's guide. For example, there is an explanation how to capture on a switched network, an ongoing effort to build a protocol reference and a lot more.
And best of all, if you would like to contribute your knowledge on a specific topic (maybe a network protocol you know well), you can edit the wiki pages by simply using your webbrowser.
The "Frequently Asked Questions" will list often asked questions and the corresponding answers.
![]() | Read the FAQ! |
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Before sending any mail to the mailing lists below, be sure to read the FAQ, as it will often answer the question(s) you might have. This will save yourself and others a lot of time (keep in mind that a lot of people are subscribed to the mailing lists). |
You will find the FAQ inside Ethereal by clicking the menu item Help/Contents and selecting the FAQ page in the upcoming dialog.
An online version is available at the ethereal website: http://www.ethereal.com/faq.html. You might prefer this online version, as it's typically more up to date and the HTML format is easier to use.
There are several mailing lists of specific Ethereal topics available:
This mailing list will inform you about new program releases, which usually appear about every 4-8 weeks.
This list is for users of Ethereal. People post questions about building and using Ethereal, others (hopefully) provide answers.
This list is for Ethereal developers. People post questions about the development of Ethereal, others (hopefully) provide answers. If you want to start developing a protocol dissector, join this list.
This list is for Ethereal developers. Everytime a change to the bug database occurs, a mail to this mailing list is generated. If you want to be notified about all the changes to the bug database, join this list. Details about the bug database can be found in Section 1.6.5, “Bug database”.
This list is for Ethereal developers. Everytime a change to the SVN repository is checked in, a mail to this mailing list is generated. If you want to be notified about all the changes to the SVN repository, join this list. Details about the SVN repository can be found in Section 4.2, “The Ethereal Subversion repository”.
You can subscribe to each of these lists from the Ethereal web site: http://www.ethereal.com. Simply select the mailing lists link on the left hand side of the site. The lists are archived at the Ethereal web site as well.
![]() | Tip! |
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You can search in the list archives to see if someone asked the same question some time before and maybe already got an answer. That way you don't have to wait until someone answers your question. |
The Etereal community started collecting bug reports in a Bugzilla database at http://bugs.ethereal.com. This database is filled with manually filed bug reports, usually after some discussion on ethereal-dev, and bug reports from the QA build tooling.
![]() | Note! |
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Before reporting any problems, please make sure you have installed the latest version of Ethereal. |
If you report problems, provide as much information as possible. In general, just think about what you would need to find that problem, if someone else sends you such a problem report. Also keep in mind, that people uses a lot of different platforms to compile/run Ethereal on.
When reporting problems with Ethereal, it is helpful if you supply the following information:
The version number of Ethereal and the dependent libraries linked with it, eg GTK+, etc. You can obtain this with the command ethereal -v.
Information about the platform you run Ethereal on.
A detailed description of your problem.
If you get an error/warning message, copy the text of that message (and also a few lines before and after it, if there are some), so others may find the build step where things go wrong. Please don't give something like: "I get a warning when comiling x" as this won't give any direction to look at.
![]() | Don't send large files! |
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Do not send large files (>100KB) to the mailing lists, just place a note that further data is available on request. Large files will only annoy a lot of people on the list who are not interested in your specific problem. If required, you will be asked for further data by the persons who really can help you. |
![]() | Don't send confidential information! |
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If you send captured data to the mailing lists, or add it to your bug report, be sure it doesn't contain any sensitive or confidential information, such as passwords. |
When reporting crashes with Ethereal, it is helpful if you supply the traceback information (besides the information mentioned in Section 1.6.6, “Reporting Problems”).
You can obtain this traceback information with the following commands:
$ gdb `whereis ethereal | cut -f2 -d: | cut -d' ' -f2` core >& bt.txt backtrace ^D $
![]() | Note |
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Type the characters in the first line verbatim! Those are back-tics there! |
![]() | Note |
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backtrace is a gdb command. You should
enter it verbatim after the first line shown above, but it will not be
echoed. The ^D
(Control-D, that is, press the Control key and the D key
together) will cause gdb to exit. This will
leave you with a file called
|
![]() | Note |
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If you do not have gdb available, you will have to check out your operating system's debugger. |
You should mail the traceback to the ethereal-dev[AT]ethereal.com mailing list, or append it to your bug report.
The Windows distributions don't contain the symbol files (.pdb), because they are very large. For this reason it's not possible to create a meaningful backtrace file from it. You should report your crash just like other problems, using the mechanism from Section 1.6.6, “Reporting Problems”.