EtherApe

A graphical network monitor
EtherApe logo Hosted at Sourceforge
 Information
Introduction
Features
Authors
Screen Shots
Licensing

Download

Requirements
Binary Packages
Source Code

Resources

F.A.Q.
Mailing Lists
Public Forums
Bug Reporting

Development

Project Page
Bug Tracking
Anonymous CVS
 Mini Screen Shot


v0.9.3

 Description
EtherApe is a graphical network monitor for Unix modeled after etherman. Featuring link layer, ip and TCP modes, it displays network activity graphically. Hosts and links change in size with traffic. Color coded protocols display.
It supports Ethernet, FDDI, Token Ring, ISDN, PPP and SLIP devices. It can filter traffic to be shown, and can read traffic from a file as well as live from the network.
 News

Overview of changes in EtherApe 0.9.7 (Saturday Sep 30 2006):

Bugfix release. Special thanks to Pav Lucistnik for providing patches and bug reports.

Changes summary:

  • Fixed bug 1496607, thread termination failure (Bug report by Pav Lucistnik).
  • Fixed bug 1496621, crash after pausing (Fix by Pav Lucistnik).
  • Fixed bug 1496614, crash in initialize_ethers() (Fix by Pav Lucistnik).

Overview of changes in EtherApe 0.9.6 (Tuesday May 16 2006):

Some distributions had trouble linking correctly EtherApe.  This release should fix that.

Changes summary:

  • On newer distros (like FC5) the linker was called without --export-dynamic, making EtherApe unusable.
  • Fixed bug 1488215, "cancel" button on preferences dialog doesn't work.
  • Updated .desktop and .spec files
  • Updated debian files. Thanks to F.Peters (debian maintainer).

Overview of changes in EtherApe 0.9.5 (Saturday May 6 2006):

After the recent changes the manual was really obsolete.  This release features a completely rewritten one, properly integrated with the Gnome help browser. You'll find EtherApe under Applications - System tools.

Changes summary:

  • Manual completely rewritten with docbook-XML. Now registers with scrollkeeper.
  • Thanks to Jeffrey G. Gomberg, who had the patience to test and identify problems, this release features improved OSX support.
  • Thanks to Ben Allen, added a new opzion, 'zero-delay' (-z) to play captured files without accounting for timestamp.  Usually EtherApe uses the timestamp to playback packets as they came in when recording. This option essentially disables this, making as if all packets came in at once. 
    As Ben said 'It provides a QUICK way to generate a graph of all of the conversations in a capture file, without having to wait the length of the capture. This is helpful for visualizing data from long (hours to days) captures'.
  • Fixed a bug preventing conversations to expire properly.

Overview of changes in EtherApe 0.9.4 (Saturday Jan 14 2006):

This release comes after a first round of extensive refactoring, needed to clean up some of the cruft accumulated during the years and make further developments easier. While still a work in progress, memory control is tighter and protocol dissectors more robust. 

EtherApe calculates an extensive set of traffic statistics, even if only a small part is always visible on the diagram.  For example, every node and link maintains complete data for every protocol seen, even if only the most active is displayed.  Thus, the detail dialogs now show also traffic breakdown by protocol.

Changes summary:

  • New feature: link info dialog. Double-clicking on a link shows traffic and protocol statistics.
  • New feature: improved node info dialog now displays both traffic and protocol statistics.
  • New feature: protocol aging. Now protocols, like nodes and links, can expire and be purged automatically.
  • Heavy refactoring to make sources easier to understand and maintain.
  • Small performance enhancements due to refactoring.
  • Better memory handling due to refactoring.
  • Unified handling of traffic statistics.
  • Rewritten interface listing. Now uses directly pcap_findalldevs to list interfaces available for capturing. The interface submenu now list also the "any" device, if present. The older method is deprecated (at the moment it can be enabled with a #define) and will be removed in a future release. If someone needs it, please file a feature request.
  • Tidied up preferences dialog, removing unneeded entries.
  • Rewritten and improved node/link timeout handling.
  • Fixes bug 1362426 (i8n issues). Thanks to Daniel Nylander for hunting down that and providing a detailed example.
  • Fixes bug 1385105 (crash with double free). Thanks to goga_russian for the segnalation.
  • Fixes bug 1372245 (crashes when node goes too big). Thanks to goga_russing for the segnalation.
  • Fixes bug 1396236 ("force numeric" and "dns resolution" checkboxes not working).
  • Fixes bug 1268291 (OSX net/if.h). Thanks to Eric Stewart for the patch.
  • Legend labels now align to left.
  • Fixed a bug when closing the preferences dialog.

Overview of changes in EtherApe 0.9.3 (Thursday 8-18-2005):

  • Fixes bug 1083524 (deletion of all user colors)
  • Fixes bug 1024944 (compilation on OSX).  Thanks to Lars Eggert for the patch.
  • Fixes a bug with the legend handling (beware: on later gnomes the legend could behave strangely if you use a binary package built for an older gnome release)

Overview of changes in EtherApe 0.9.2 (Saturday 8-13-2005):

  • New multithreaded name resolution using the standard resolver api. Works with dns, /etc/host, ...

    Note: The multithreaded resolver needs gethostbyaddr_r(). If your distribution doesn't have it, you're forced to use the old resolver.

  • Small fixes for gcc 4
  • cvs cleanup

All the news...

Juan Toledo, Riccardo Ghetta
Last modified: $Date: 2006/09/30 06:21:52 $