How to Update Wireshark (Ethereal)

Aamer Akhter, Cisco Systems

In today's networks there are an increasing number of new protocols and changes to existing protocol changes occurring on an almost daily basis. One of the tried and tested methods of diagnosing problems by networking professionals is using a 'network analyzer' or sniffer. However, with the velocity of protocol changes the protocol analyser may not have been updated to decode the new formats. This problem is even more common in our test and validation labs. This presentation will give a overview of how Wireshark works from a user perspective. From the developer perspective, layout of the code, commonly used functions, and a walk through of extending Wireshark to support MVPN (multicast VPN) decoding of BGP. Wireshark is free and licensed under GPL.

Bio:

Aamer Akhter, joined Cisco Systems, Inc. in 1998 after graduating from Georgia Tech with a Bachelor's of Science in electrical engineering. After joining the Technical Assistance Center (TAC), he has worked in various capacities for cisco supporting large service provider and enterprise customers, as well as testing, designing and deploying several large Layer 2 and MPLS/VPN networks. Mr. Akhter is currently working as a technical marketing engineer in the areas of Network Virtualization, Wan-Optimization and router instrumentation. He is CCIE number 4543.