Ethereal Power
See how to use Ethereal to monitor your network’s traffic.
Thursday, September 15th, 2005
One of the most important tools in a network administrator’s toolbox is a packet sniffer, a program that intercepts and displays network traffic. Using a packet sniffer, you can examine the individual bytes that make up packets sent across the network wire. Depending on your network configuration, packet sniffers can see traffic sent to or from the computer on which the sniffer runs and even monitor traffic between other computers on the network.
A packet sniffer is quite a powerful tool, but because it operates at such a low level, running one also requires greater expertise than many other network diagnostic tools. Advanced packet sniffers (often called protocol analyzers) can avoid such complications by helping you interpret data packets.
