If you want to know what is going on on your network or whether some malicious or suspicious software broke in and just started floating around your network, you may want to give Wireshark a try. Wireshark gives you the real answers based on sensitive data about what is actually happening inside your network.
Wireshark was known for many years as Ethereal, and got renamed due to trademark issues in the summer of 2006. With this tool you can capture your network packets on either wired connections (LAN) or wireless connections (WLAN): PPP/HDLC, WiFi, ATM, Bluetooth, USB, Token Ring, Frame Relay, FDDI, and others (depending on your platform). It supports almost all the leading operating systems in the industry, including 64-bit. The supported protocols list is really way beyond your expectation. The major advantage is that the developers are constantly trying to add all the newest protocols defined. As a bonus, by using GeoIP, with Wireshark you can also include or exclude traffic based on a particular country.
The live capture of your network data can be used for further analysis off-line. You can save the captured data into any of the most popular formats.
v1.2 [May 28, 2009]
Bug Fixes
The following bugs have been fixed:
SNMPv3 Engine ID registration. (Bug 2426)
Open file dialog always displayed when clicking anywhere on Wireshark. (Bug 2478)
tshark reports wrong number of bytes on big dumpfiles with -z io,stat. (Bug 3205)
Negative INTEGER number displayed as positive number in SNMP dissector. (Bug 3230)
Add support for FT_BOOLEAN fields to wslua FieldInfo. (Bug 4049)
Wireshark crashes w/ GLib error when trying to play RTP stream. (Bug 4119)
Windows 2000 support has been restored. (Bug 4176)
Wrong dissection on be_cell_id_list for bssmap. (Bug 4437)
I/O Graph dropdown boxes not working correctly. (Bug 4487)
Runtime Error when right-clicking field and selecting "Filter Field Reference". (Bug 4522)
In GSM SMS PDU TPVPF showing wrong. (Bug 4524)
Profinet: May be wrong defined byte meaning. (Bug 4525)
GLib-CRITICAL ** Message. (Bug 4547)
Certain EDP display filters trigger Wireshark/tshark runtime error. (Bug 4563)
Some NCP frames trigger "Dissector bug, protocol NCP". (Bug 4565)
The encapsulation abbreviation "bluetooth-h4" is ambiguous. (Bug 4613)
Updated Protocol Support
BSSMAP, DMP, GSM SMS, LDSS, NCP, PN/IO, PPP, SIP, SNMP
A program that lets you easily manage your laptop connections to WiMAX networks
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