Ralf Eisenreich

Wireshark Logo

Wireshark is the successor application of Ethereal. Wireshark is a free (GNU General Public License) network traffic analyser (packet sniffer).
This tool is very useful to test encrypted connections of own applications or to analyse active connections and data flows on the own desktop.

Here is an application screenshot:
The application layout consists of 3 parts (windows) – packet list, packet details and packet bytes.

Wireshark Application Screenshot

A sample ICQ data flow:
This data flow contains the message: “Gratulation zum Motoradführerschein “

ICQ Data Flow

Supported Systems:
Wireshark runs on Unix-like systems (e.g. Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Mac OS X) and on Microsoft Windows.

[Source: Wireshark]