When I needed a Network Protocol Analyzer last week, I realized that I had recently uninstalled one (I think it was NetSniffer), in a fit of tidiness. It was several years old, and I hadn't used it in over a year, so it seemed reasonable to nuke it at the time. I should have known that deleting it would be the computer equivalent of putting my snow boots away in early spring.
I tried using Fiddler2 to capture Web service traffic, but it couldn't: Fiddler hooks into WinInet, but Microsoft's implementation of Web services in C# and C++ works at a lower level. I thought of the open source Ethereal project, but the latest release was over a year old.
Dave Methvin pointed me at Wireshark, which is the current name for Ethereal: it was renamed in May 2006. Wireshark did indeed show me the Web service traffic I needed to monitor, along with a whole bunch of other network traffic that I didn't care about.
Wireshark depends on the WinPcap driver on Windows. On Linux, where Wireshark comes as a standard package, it hooks into the system drivers. Wireshark isn't the easiest software in the world to learn or use, but it works nicely, and the price is right.
Posted by Martin Heller on July 23, 2007 07:50 AM
