> What exactly is Ethereal so useful for? Ethereal is good for troubleshooting network connectivity issues. Some people might argue that tcpdump already does the trick, however, ethereal also parses the actual protocol (be it HTTP/1.1, CDP, IS-IS, etc.) and lets the guy troubleshooting see what's really being sent on the wire. The graphical frontend to it is also nice when replaying and attempting to understand something one captured earlier on. > and if you really need it, then it's no longer than a "yum install" away This goes without saying for everything else, too. I bet the distribution could only the kernels, glibc, sh and yum. ;-) I would argue that ethereal is a nice tool to have around. ;-) Network troubleshooting tools should not be "one yum install away" because your network might not be up and running when you need it most. Perhaps it would be better to start with the larger packages (such as KDE, XFCE or Openoffice) *ducks* // kaj
