Alternatively, press the fourth icon from the left, with the white x in a red background, which is only active during captures. To stop capturing, select Capture and then Stop from the WireShark menu. If you know nothing about TCP, IP or UDP, you may find the output confusing. The easiest way to start capturing network packages is to click your preferred interface, which will make WireShark immediately start capturing network packets (Figure 2). What follows are the initial steps towards successful network traffic analysis.Īfter running WireShark with the required user privileges, you will be able to see the list of available network interfaces. Before you start capturing, it is better to have in mind a particular issue that you want to solve or examine. WireShark allows you to follow a TCP/IP conversation between two machines, view packet data, etc. WireShark captures packets, and analyses and displays them in a human-readable format. Some protocols are reliable, whereas others are not, which means they do not guarantee package delivery this is not always a problem, but the application must deal with it, if required.

The header part contains information that is needed by the protocol, whereas the body part contains the data. Each packet has a header and a body part. Information is transferred using packets. When we say TCP/IP, we not only mean the TCP and IP protocols, but many other protocols including ARP, BOOTP, UDP, ICMP, FTP, etc. Figure 1 shows WireShark run by a user without root privileges.īefore going into more details about WireShark, I have to talk about network traffic in Ethernet networks that use the TCP/IP family of protocols.

Run WireShark as the root (sudo wireshark) when capturing data, and as a normal user when analysing network data. If you try to run WireShark as a normal user, you may not be able to use network interfaces for capturing network traffic, due to reasons related to UNIX permissions.

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