Preface
Foreword
Wireshark is the world’s foremost network protocol analyzer, but the rich feature set can be
daunting for the unfamiliar. This document is part of an effort by the Wireshark team to improve
Wireshark’s usability. We hope that you find it useful and look forward to your comments.
Who should read this document?
The intended audience of this book is anyone using Wireshark.
This book explains all of the basic and some advanced features of Wireshark. As Wireshark has
become a very complex program, not every feature may be explained in this book.
This book is not intended to explain network sniffing in general and it will not provide details
about specific network protocols. A lot of useful information regarding these topics can be found at
the Wireshark Wiki at https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/wikis/.
By reading this book, you will learn how to install Wireshark, how to use the basic elements of the
graphical user interface (such as the menu) and what’s behind some of the advanced features that
are not always obvious at first sight. It will hopefully guide you around some common problems
that frequently appear for new (and sometimes even advanced) Wireshark users.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the whole Wireshark team for their assistance. In particular, the
authors would like to thank:
• Gerald Combs, for initiating the Wireshark project and funding to do this documentation.
• Guy Harris, for many helpful hints and a great deal of patience in reviewing this document.
• Gilbert Ramirez, for general encouragement and helpful hints along the way.
The authors would also like to thank the following people for their helpful feedback on this
document:
• Pat Eyler, for his suggestions on improving the example on generating a backtrace.
• Martin Regner, for his various suggestions and corrections.
• Graeme Hewson, for many grammatical corrections.
The authors would like to acknowledge those man page and README authors for the Wireshark
project from who sections of this document borrow heavily:
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