What is Wireshark? To answer this it is best to quote the description from the Wireshark website.
Wireshark is the world’s foremost and widely-used network protocol analyzer. It lets you see what’s happening on your network at a microscopic level and is the de facto (and often de jure) standard across many commercial and non-profit enterprises, government agencies, and educational institutions. Wireshark development thrives thanks to the volunteer contributions of networking experts around the globe and is the continuation of a project started by Gerald Combs in 1998.
Wireshark supports an enormous amount of protocols, but there are still a number of obscure protocols that aren’t used that often. But the users of those protocols would still be helped a lot if Wireshark supports those protocols, and so I started writing several Wireshark dissectors (which are now all part of the official Wireshark distribution).
Dissectors
Over the years I wrote several dissectors for Wireshark, some for in house proprietary protocols, but also for open protocols. All non proprietary dissectors I wrote are open source and part of the official Wireshark distributions.
ACN Dissector
ACN is a protocol suit to control theater equipment, like lighting. ACN is currently under development and so the Wireshark dissector will also stay under development for that time.
Art-Net Dissector
Art-Net is a protocol used, for example, for things like theaters to transport lighting data over Ethernet. The protocol is designed by Artistic Licence and put into the public domain. The dissector supports all documented packets, but there are some undocumented packets that still have to be added (when I get the needed information).
RTNET Dissector
RTNET is a protocol for realtime Ethernet communication. It uses RTAI/Linux to provide true hard-realtime communication. To get a feeling on what RT-Net looks like you can download this tcpdump file and open it in Wireshark. For more information see the RTNET Homepage and the RTAI Homepage.
Miscellaneous Dissectors
I also worked on several other protocol dissectors, including Enttec, monotone/netsync, RFC 2250 MPEG2, and RFC 2435 JPEG. Also several support protocol dissectors like DMX and RDM, that are used by the Art-Net, ACN, and Enttec dissectors are written by me.
Development
My private development branches can be found on github before I upstream them.
Test Builds
The test builds below are for Windows 10 64bit only, and are based on the upstream master branch.
- 2020-1-17 Art-Net/RDM enhancement release: Wireshark-win64-3.3.0-ER-20.1.1.exe
- 2019-12-26 Art-Net bug fix release: Wireshark-win64-3.3.0-ER-19.12.1.exe
Test Capture Files
If you have the possibility to create Art-Net and/or ACN capture files please let me know, I am interested in collecting some more reference capture files.
- Artnet/RDM example dump files: artnet_dumps.zip
- RTNET example dump files: rtnet.tcpdump.gz