Ethereal for Windows

IMPORTANT NOTE ON 802.11

Ethereal's ability to capture traffic on 802.11 networks on Windows is limited by the support offered by the Windows drivers for 802.11 adapters.

On Windows, you will not be able to capture management or control frames, and you might not even be able to capture in promiscuous mode, so you might only be able to capture traffic to and from the machine running Ethereal.

If you want to use a PC running Ethereal to monitor 802.11 traffic to or from other machines, rather than using Ethereal only to look at traffic to and from the machine on which you're running Ethereal, you should seriously consider running it on a recent version of Linux or of one of the free-software BSDs, rather than on Windows. See the Ethereal Wiki page on capture setup on WLANs for details on capturing 802.11 traffic in "monitor mode" on Linux and the free-software BSDs.

Quick Instructions

  1. Install ethereal-setup-x.y.z.exe below.
  2. Enjoy.

Detailed Instructions

To get up and running with Ethereal, download and install ethereal-setup-x.y.z.exe below. The installer includes the WinPcap packet capture driver, which must be installed if you plan to capture packets with Ethereal. If you don't install WinPcap, you will not be able to capture packets with Ethereal!

The latest version of Ethereal can always be found in this directory. Older versions are in the all-versions directory.

To install WinPcap separately, download the WinPcap installer and run it. 3.1 is the current recommended version. It is included with the Ethereal installer.

If you have an older version of WinPcap installed, you must un-install it before installing the current version.

If you do not have WinPcap installed you will be able to open saved capture files, but you will not be able to capture live network traffic.

Note that merely installing WinPcap will not install Ethereal. You will have to install Ethereal separately; see above.

You can obtain the source code to Ethereal from the parent of this directory or by following the instructions on the development page.

For more information, please refer to README.win32 in the Ethereal distribution.