You will find lots of useful information on the Wireshark homepage at http://www.wireshark.org.

The Wireshark Wiki at http://wiki.wireshark.org provides a wide range of information related to Wireshark and packet capturing in general. You will find a lot of information not part of this user's guide. For example, there is an explanation how to capture on a switched network, an ongoing effort to build a protocol reference and a lot more.

And best of all, if you would like to contribute your knowledge on a specific topic (maybe a network protocol you know well), you can edit the wiki pages by simply using your web browser.

The "Frequently Asked Questions" will list often asked questions and the corresponding answers.

	Read the FAQ!
	Before sending any mail to the mailing lists below, be sure to read the FAQ, as it will often answer the question(s) you might have. This will save yourself and others a lot of time (keep in mind that a lot of people are subscribed to the mailing lists).

You will find the FAQ inside Wireshark by clicking the menu item Help/Contents and selecting the FAQ page in the dialog shown.

An online version is available at the Wireshark website: http://www.wireshark.org/faq.html. You might prefer this online version, as it's typically more up to date and the HTML format is easier to use.

There are several mailing lists of specific Wireshark topics available:

You can subscribe to each of these lists from the Wireshark web site: http://www.wireshark.org. Simply select the mailing lists link on the left hand side of the site. The lists are archived at the Wireshark web site as well.

	Tip!
	You can search in the list archives to see if someone asked the same question some time before and maybe already got an answer. That way you don't have to wait until someone answers your question.

	Note!
	Before reporting any problems, please make sure you have installed the latest version of Wireshark.

When reporting problems with Wireshark, it is helpful if you supply the following information:

	Don't send large files!
	Do not send large files (>100KB) to the mailing lists, just place a note that further data is available on request. Large files will only annoy a lot of people on the list who are not interested in your specific problem. If required, you will be asked for further data by the persons who really can help you.

	Don't send confidential information!
	If you send captured data to the mailing lists, be sure they don't contain any sensitive or confidential information like passwords or such.

When reporting crashes with Wireshark, it is helpful if you supply the traceback information (besides the information mentioned in "Reporting Problems").

You can obtain this traceback information with the following commands:

$ gdb `whereis wireshark | cut -f2 -d: | cut -d' ' -f2` core >& bt.txt
backtrace
^D
$

		

	Note
	Type the characters in the first line verbatim! Those are back-tics there!

	Note
	backtrace is a gdb command. You should enter it verbatim after the first line shown above, but it will not be echoed. 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 bt.txt in the current directory. Include the file with your bug report.

	Note
	If you do not have gdb available, you will have to check out your operating system's debugger.

You should mail the traceback to the wireshark-dev[AT]wireshark.org mailing list.

The Windows distributions don't contain the symbol files (.pdb), because they are very large. For this reason it's not possible to create a meaningful backtrace file from it. You should report your crash just like other problems, using the mechanism described above.