Reporting problems and getting help
If you have problems, or need help with Ethereal, there are several mailing lists that may be of interest to you:
- Ethereal Users
This list is for users of Ethereal. People post with questions about building and using Ethereal. Others provide answers.
- Ethereal Announce
This list is for people wanting to receive announcements about Ethereal.
- Ethereal Dev
This list is for Ethereal developers. If you want to start developing a protocol dissector, join this list.
When reporting crashes with Ethereal, it is helpful if you supply the following information:
The version number of Ethereal you found the problem with, eg Ethereal 0.8.10.
The version number of the other software linked with Ethereal, eg GTK+, etc. You can obtain this with the command ethereal -v.
A traceback if Ethereal crashed. You can obtain this with the following commands:
$ gdb `whereis ethereal | cut -f2 -d: | cut -f' ' -d2` core >& backtrace.txt backtrace ^D $
Type the characters in the first line verbatim! Those are back-tics there!
backtrace is a gdb command. You should enter it verbatim after the first line shown above. The ^D (Control-D, that is, press the Control key and the D key together) will cause gdb to exit. This will leave you with a file called backtrace.txt in the current directory. Include the file with your bug report.
If you do not have gdb available, you will have to check out your operating system's debugger. Windows users might not be able to get a traceback.
You should mail the traceback to the ethereal-dev mailing list.