In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure Wireshark on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Wireshark is a free and open-source packet analyzer. It is used for network troubleshooting, monitoring, analysis, software, and communications protocol development. Wireshark offers a graphical interface to view and analyze network results so it’s easy to use. It can capture network traffic to specific devices and network interfaces and can save the captured traffic to various formats for analysis and troubleshoot of network-related problems.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation Wireshark network analyzer on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: LUbuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus).
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- A
non-root sudo useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install Wireshark on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Step 2. Installing Wireshark.
Run the commands below in the terminal to install Wireshark:
apt-get install wireshark
During the installation, it will require to confirm security about allowing non-superuser to execute Wireshark. Just confirm YES if you want to. If you check on NO, you must run Wireshark with sudo. Later, if you want to change this:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure wireshark-common
Step 3. Start Capturing Packet.
Once installed, a new group named Wireshark will be created when installing Wireshark. You can verify this by looking at the end of /etc/group file:
tail /etc/group
Running Wireshark as root is insecure. To run Wireshark as a normal user you have to add yourself to the Wireshark group:
sudo gpasswd -a <YourUserName> wireshark
Wireshark will be the user’s secondary group. To temporarily set Wireshark as the user’s primary group, run the following command:
newgrp wireshark
Finally, Start the Wireshark program from the terminal:
wireshark
Note: If you want to start Wireshark in the application menu, you have to log out of the current session and log back in.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed Wireshark. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Wireshark network analyzer on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Wireshark website.
