Introduction

In this chapter we will cover all of the steps necessary to complete a functioning installation of the Ethereal network analyzer. Due to the overwhelming amount of UNIX-based distributions available today, installation instructions can vary from distribution to distribution, and are beyond the scope of this chapter. For this reason we will be focusing on information specific to installation on the Red Hat 9.0 platform and the Solaris 9.0 platform. We have chosen Red Hat because it is the most commonly used Linux distribution in the world, and serves as a good starting point on which to base further installations. Most of what we cover here should apply to most other popular distributions without a large amount of modification; but if the instructions do vary, it will be minimal. We chose Solaris because of its common use in commercial and government environments, and for its ease of management and software installation process. For the Windows side we will be focusing on Windows 2000 Professional, due to its common use. However, since Windows XP is also a popular choice these days, we tested the installation process on it as well. Although it won t be covered in this book, the installation on Windows XP was exactly the same as Windows 2000.

For the installations in this chapter, we started with fresh installations of all three of the operating systems (OSs). For Red Hat 9.0 we chose the workstation install option so that the proper development libraries would be included. In...