Ethernal is a simple tool for visualizing all incoming and outgoing Ethernet packets. The source code of the application is available.

I wanted to learn how to read raw Ethernet packets on MacOS X. After going through several examples, I ended up writing this little piece of software. It uses the Berkeley Packet Filter device to read all incoming and outgoing Ethernet packets. I have wrapped the whole thing in a Cocoa GUI using the new bindings features of Mac OS 10.3.

Here are some key features of "Ethernal":

Â￭ Reads all incoming/outgoing Ethernet packets
Â￭ Displays the packet content in hexadecimal/ascii
Â￭ Finds any string in packet
Â￭ Filters packets
Â￭ Dynamic display width
Â￭ Save/load packets to disk.