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<DIV>well stated!!</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Jon</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Jon L. Miller, MCNE, CNS, ASE<BR>Director/Sr Systems Consultant<BR>MMT
Networks Pty Ltd<BR><A
href="http://www.mmtnetworks.com.au">http://www.mmtnetworks.com.au</A></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure<BR> is trying
to please everybody." -Bill Cosby</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><BR><BR>>>> craig@postnewspapers.com.au 1:13:31 pm 23/07/2004
>>><BR>On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 12:06, Marc Wiriadisastra wrote:<BR>>
I'm just messing around with stuff on my fc computer and I've come <BR>>
across ethereal. Now I know its a packet monitoring program can someone
<BR>> please explain what the purpose apart from looking at packets its used
for.<BR><BR>Well, it's used for network troubleshooting, program testing,
protocol<BR>reverse engineering, network security analysis and network
intrusion<BR>monitoring (as mentioned by Marc) among other things. It's handy
for all<BR>these things because it's so flexible - it can display and
analyze<BR>traffic in real time or from a stored capture file, it can
filter<BR>traffic based on an incredibly flexible ruleset, and it can
track<BR>relationships between packets in traffic flows. <BR><BR>Ethereal can
make it possible to pick out one connection in amongst a<BR>100MBit/s traffic
stream, then reconstruct that connection's traffic<BR>into a human-readable text
display of the data transmitted, plus a delay<BR>graph showing how long the gaps
between each packet were.<BR><BR>It's great, and it's saved my sanity several
times when trying to debug<BR>weird network problems. When combined with a good
switch that can dump<BR>all traffic down one designated monitoring port (ideally
a gigabit<BR>port), Ethereal is just incredible for tracking down odd
network<BR>problems.<BR><BR>Ethereal is a great tool to be familiar with, and
I'd advise you to play<BR>with it and learn about it if you plan to work with
networks in the<BR>future.<BR><BR>--<BR>Craig
Ringer<BR><BR><BR><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>PLUG
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