What are some good Wireshark tutorials? [closed]

Question

I'm trying to understand how to use Wireshark right now, but the official manual isn't a fun read at all when starting out. Its too detailed, and the details are going right over my head because of the information overloading :)

What are some more didactic tutorials out there?

Thanks!

Edit: WireShark is a network packet sniffer, and it's very useful for debugging network applications. I'm working on networked applications, and plan to use it as a Debugging tool to make my job as a programmer happier. I guess this is about programming related as asking for tutorials about gbd, valgrind or mdb, dtrace, prstat, cat, visual studio or eclipse.

Answer 1

I wouldn't start with a tutorial on Wireshark itself necessarily. Reading the Wireshark manual first is kind of like reading the help guide to Visual Studio; if you already knew the basics of how programming is done the IDE would naturally make a lot of sense.

If you google and find some tutorials on Ethernet in general (the structure of packets, how TCP and UDP data gets from point A to point B, etc) then the information Wireshark presents will make sense naturally.

For extra bonus points check out Cisco's OSI model - if you can understand each layer of that then you'll have a deep understanding of what Wireshark is telling you.

If you just want a quickstart: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bazkLeY6b4

Answer 2

These should do it:

Wireshark & Ethereal Network Protocol Analyzer Toolkit (Jay Beale's Open Source Security)

Practical Packet Analysis: Using Wireshark to Solve Real-World Network Problems