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Chapter 1. Instant Wireshark Starter
Welcome to Instant Wireshark Starter . This book has been especially created to provide you with all the information you need to set up Wireshark and network analysis. You will learn the basics of Wireshark, get started with building your first course, and discover some tips and tricks for using Wireshark.
This book contains the following sections:
So, what is Wireshark? tells you what Wireshark actually is, what you can do with it, and why it's so great.
Installation teaches you how to download and install Wireshark with minimum fuss and then set it up so that you can use it as soon as possible on your favorite operating system.
Quick start your first packet capture shows you how to perform one of the core tasks of Wireshark; network packet analysis. We will cover both the graphical as well as the command-line interface of Wireshark in this section.
Top 5 features you need to know about explains how to perform different tasks with the most important features of Wireshark. By the end of this section you will be able to:
- Start working with packet streams
- Understand name resolution and packet reassembling
- Analyze statistics of captured packets
- Decode captured data
- Export captured data
- Use Wireshark command-line tools
Wireshark activity shows live implementation of Wireshark and implements the topics mentioned previously.
People and places you should get to know provides you with many useful links to the project pages and forums, as well as a number of helpful articles, tutorials, blogs, and the Twitter feeds of Wireshark super-contributors.
So, what is Wireshark?
Wireshark is an open source network packet analyzer tool that captures data packets flowing over the wire (network) and presents them in an understandable form. Wireshark can be considered as a Swiss army knife as it can be used under different circumstances such as network troubleshoot, security operations, and learning protocol internals. This one tool does it all with ease.
Some of the important benefits of working with Wireshark are:
- Multiple protocol support : Wireshark supports a wide range of protocols ranging from TCP, UDP, and HTTP to advanced protocols such as AppleTalk.
- User friendly interface : Wireshark has an interactive graphical interface that helps in analyzing the packet capture. It also has several advance options such as filtering the packets, exporting packets, and name resolution.
- Live traffic analysis : Wireshark can capture live data flowing on the wire and quickly generate information about its protocols, flow media, communication channels, and so on.
- Open source project : Wireshark is an open source project and most of its development has been carried out through contribution from over 500 developers around the globe. We can write our own code and add to the project to meet our specific requirements.
These multiple functionalities of Wireshark make it one of the most popular open source network analyzer tools. In the later sections, we will discuss these operations of Wireshark in detail.
How does Wireshark work?
Let us give a brief introduction to the working process of Wireshark.