Friday, March 21, 2008

Great Tool for Swimming with Network Sharks

I was looking to debug a problem involving clients connecting to FTP servers and was in need of a packet sniffer. A colleague of mine pointed me at an open source tool named "WireShark" (http://www.wireshark.org). This is a great tool. It's a bit like tcpdump, but it includes a beautiful GUI and does a great job at filtering packets and at exporting/importing data. It also run son Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.

Here's a screen shot:

2 comments:

slashdotaccount said...

Always a good idea to mention that wireshark has a history of security issues, so it is a good idea to check if there are any open CVEs before using it. For example there are 4 open currently in Debian:

http://security-tracker.debian.net/tracker/source-package/wireshark

Len DiMaggio said...

Great point! Thanks for commenting. The last thing you want to do in debugging a problem is to open up a new security hole.