June 2012 Meeting Details
The meeting of the “Indian Libre User Group” was successfully held on June 24th 2012
Date: 24-06-2012
Time: 2:00pm – 5.30pm
Venue: Internet Club, IInd Floor,
AMI Trust Building,Broadway Enclave,
Broadway, Ernakulam
2.30pm – 2.45pm
Customary Self Introduction.
People shared their experience with Free Software
2.45pm – 4.15pm – Wireshark by Jay Jacob
Wireshark is a free and open-source packet analyzer. It is used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development, and education. Originally named Ethereal, in May 2006 the project was renamed Wireshark due to trademark issues. Wireshark is cross-platform, using the GTK+ widget toolkit to implement its user interface, and using pcap to capture packets; it runs on various Unix-like operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, and Solaris, and on Microsoft Windows. There is also a terminal-based (non-GUI) version called TShark. Wireshark, and the other programs distributed with it such as TShark, are free software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Features
Wireshark is software that “understands” the structure of different networking protocols. Thus, it is able to display the encapsulation and the fields along with their meanings of different packets specified by different networking protocols. Wireshark uses pcap to capture packets, so it can only capture the packets on the types of networks that pcap supports.
1. Data can be captured “from the wire” from a live network connection or read from a file that recorded already-captured packets.
2. Live data can be read from a number of types of network, including Ethernet, IEEE 802.11, PPP, and loopback.
3. Captured network data can be browsed via a GUI, or via the terminal (command line) version of the utility, TShark.
4. Captured files can be programmatically edited or converted via command-line switches to the “editcap” program.
5. Data display can be refined using a display filter.
6. Plug-ins can be created for dissecting new protocols.
7. VoIP calls in the captured traffic can be detected. If encoded in a compatible encoding, the media flow can even be played.
8. Raw USB traffic can be captured.
Wireshark’s native network trace file format is the libpcap format supported by libpcap and WinPcap, so it can exchange files of captured network traces with other applications using the same format, including tcpdump and CA NetMaster. It can also read captures from other network analyzers, such as snoop, Network General’s Sniffer, and Microsoft Network Monitor.
4.15pm – 4.30pm
Tea break
Concluding Session
People were requested to handle small technical discussions for the next meeting.
Thanks to all the attendees for coming and they are requested to put their feedback on the mailing list so that we can improve future meetings
The next user meet is on 22nd July 2012