Wireshark is a great tool for capturing and analyzing packets for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communication protocol development, education and reverse engineering. It is a free and open-source software that was originally known as Ethereal. It can run on various OS platforms like Microsoft Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and many others.

If you are familiar with tcpdump, Wireshark is very much similar to it only that it comes with a graphical user interface which greatly simplify your task in analyzing the network packet.

To install Wireshark under Fedora Linux, you need to install two packages through yum.

First you install the text-based wireshark package and then its GUI package.

 
    # yum install wireshark
    # yum install wireshark-gnome

The first package wireshark, installs only the textbased tools of wireshark. You don't need to install this if you only need a textbased packet capture software since Fedora and other Linux and Unix OS installations already comes with tcpdump.

The second package wireshark-gnome, will install the GUI components of wireshark.

To run Wireshark, go to Applications > Internet > Wireshark Network Analyzer or execute:

    # /usr/bin/wireshark

Once it is running, you can then start capturing packets passing through you network interface.

To download Wireshark for other OS click here.

Enjoy!