trying to understand the place of iptables, ipchains, Wireshark and how it all fits

dave247 · 10-29-2010, 03:52 AM

ok so I am doing security stuff under linux... I've heard of Wireshark and Snort and dsniff and have been reading up on them on wikipedia pages but the big picture is not clear to me yet. Are things like Wireshard and Snort BASED on the functionality of iptables in Linux? I read that you have to be root to run iptables, but not to run Wireshark right? Yet Wireshark is dependent on iptables.

can someone help me understand how these things work together?

acid_kewpie · 10-29-2010, 04:24 AM

these tools are nothing at all to do with iptables. iptables / netfilter is the Linux network security stack, but wireshark is just a tool for Linux, Windows, BSD, OSX to analyse network traffic. iptables is used to modify the system settings for network control within netfilter, so naturally needs root access to change stuff like that. Wireshark needs root access to be able to read from all network adapters and such, but you're mistaken to think they really have anything at all in common, they do not work together.

OlRoy · 10-29-2010, 09:59 AM

What acid_kewpie said... To put it another way... Wireshark is used to look at and analyze packets (network traffic) and iptables / netfilter is a firewall which is used to filter packets (network traffic).

salasi · 10-30-2010, 06:49 AM

...and you can probably ignore ipchains, as that was an older utility that has been superseded by iptables...