Practical Packet Analysis

Installing Wireshark

The Wireshark installation process is surprisingly simple. In this section we will look at Wireshark's system requirements and then go through the steps involved in installing Wireshark on both Windows and Linux.

System Requirements

Before you install Wireshark, you must make sure that your system meets the following requirements:

• A 400 MHz processor or faster

• At least 60MB of available storage space

• An NIC that supports promiscuous mode

• The WinPcap capture driver

The WinPcap capture driver is the Windows implementation of the Pcap packet capturing interface application programming interface (API). Simply put, this driver interacts with your OS to capture raw packet data, apply filters, and switch the NIC in and out of promiscuous ...