Wireshark (aka Ethereal) is a free packet sniffer computer application. It is used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development, and education. In June 2006, the project was renamed from Ethereal due to trademark issues. The functionality Wireshark provides is very similar to tcpdump, but it has a graphical front-end and many more information sorting and filtering options. It allows the user to see all traffic being passed over the network (usually an Ethernet network but support is being added for others) by putting the network interface into promiscuous mode. Wireshark uses the cross-platform GTK+ widget toolkit. Its powerful features make it the tool of choice for network troubleshooting, protocol development, and education worldwide. If you use a filesystem that supports posix capabilities, an easy way to start wireshark as a normal user, while still providing it with all of the access permissions it requires, is by issuing the following command: $ setcap cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin=eip /usr/bin/dumpcap You will need to remove any already-installed wireshark package before building this one or else the new one will not work (the new build will link libraries present in the old package, which will then be removed when upgrading). Optional dependencies: - c-ares - portaudio - krb5 - spandsp - snappy - lz4 NOTE: Wireshark 2.6 is the last release to support the legacy GTK-based UI. NOTE: Although lua is listed as a requirement, it's possible to build using lua52. This may be needed for some third-party Lua plugins (but, it may break other third-party Lua plugins; your mileage may vary). The default is to build with lua52 if it's installed, or lua otherwise. If you have both lua versions installed, you can build with LUA52=no in the environment to build with the older lua.