Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Wireshark on U3

Wireshark (former known as Ethereal) is a great tool for network diagnostics. I have been using it extensively to monitor network performance of my network applications. Recently I discovered that they have release a U3 package for it!
If you have a U3 flash drive and you frequent need to perform network diagnostics on various computers, I would really recommend you to try it out.
When you launch Wireshark from U3 launchpad, it will prompt you if you would like to install winpcap on the computer if it has not been installed. After winpcap has been installed, it will launch wireshark.
Once you have finished using wireshark, when you click on the eject button on U3 launchpad, it will also automatically uninstall the winpcap!
While this installation/uninstallation of winpcap seems a bit clumsy, it is still very useful as I can bring wireshark anywhere, stick it into any Windows PC and start troubleshooting the network!