hi,
this is my first post so please take it easy. I saw this on another post made by a user and would like to ask what exactly do they do? I would like to see my buddy's ip, how can i use these to see that? is it legal to use these?

i use suse 10
thanks

easy?? what do you want to do? "see his ip" means what? for all we know he's written on a bit if paper! either way ethereal and nmap are a packet analyzer and port scanner respectively... can't see why they'd be useful to you here, but i casn't say for sure as you've told us nothing about what you're trying to do. if he's just out there on the net somewhere then he needs to tell you....

thanks for the reply, is it illegal for me to ask how to find out someone ip?

There are in excess of 4 billion public internet ip addresses... how on earth do you propose to start finding out???? there is no big database of ip addresses

Dave your best mate: 20.23.64.123
Paul from work: 22.53.39.214
Mike from the corner shop: 213.243.83.2

If you want a genuinely useful answer, you need to write a proper question... e.g. what kind of interaction are you having with the remote user? It's not illegal to ask... because that literally is all you've done... ask "how can i find someone's IP?". Now if you were asking somethign like "How can I find a WEP key on my mates wireless connection whilst i'm sitting outside his house in my car scanning his wireless traffic with Kismet?" now that's somethign dubios to work on...

k then here goes nothing,
i am trying to find out ther person who is on my aim buddy list's ip address. how do i do so?

Finally it's AIM... you think the FBI are about to burst in now? well google has plenty of suggestions, but yes they do generally appear to be dubious exploits, which i won't repeat here. Linux iun itself will not make this any easier or more difficult AFAIK.

so it's illegal?