ethereal

hi guys,
when ever i try to sniff using ethreal my box reboots,do you guys know why

i am running windowsXP pro and have zone alarm installed

Check your version of WINPCAP (3.0 is the newest I would use). Also, what version of ethereal are you trying to run? Is service pack 2 installed on XP?

I've seen this issue before with NMAP and it had to do with a bad packet capture library, but my guess here is that SP2 may be to blame.

I run the newest version of Ethereal on my XP SP2 box and it seems to work fine. Are the any odd events in your event log? (to get to your event logs just type "eventvwr.msc" in your start bar and hit enter)

Speaking of ethereal, why is it that some of my packets say the source address as

00000000.00040afe963e

with the destination address of

00000000.FFFFFFFF

Is it some type of name query? The protocol is NBIPX. Give someone give further explaination of what this protocol does?

Sounds like you have IPX/SPX enabled on Windows. IPX/SPX was/is Novell's networking protocol.

What did the protocol do? Why was it enabled on my system? default?

Different protocols ensure different ways of communicating. This particular one is Novell's way of dealing with some ether-type communications on networks. You should be able to change what protocol Ethereal is monitoring in the settings.

It's probably provided by Windows as a compatibility issue, but I'm not sure.

By the way, sanitize your posts... you just posted your MAC address :)

Thanks. Now I understand.

<offtopic>
whats the harm in posting a MAC address?
They are used on a LAN and don't matter over the internet...
</offtopic>