Ok, on our next module,
we will talk about preferences.
Again, this won't take very long but
it's part of unerstanding profiles.
We highlighted why profiles are very important.
We try to work very efficiently.
When something breaks on a network,
it's never a good thing.
The network impacts everything
so when a router is flaky or a
switch goes down that's very different
from a client desktop not working
and or a server having an IO problem.
It generally impacts a wide scale
part of the enterprise so we try to get
things done in efficient manner so that
we can get to the root cause and try to
isolate and solve what the problem may be.
Part of doing that is being able to work
efficiently and to do that what's
recommended is that you set up
the preferences for profiles so that
when you go in and you try to solve
a problem with Wireshark, you start
ascertaining what the problem may be.
You're gathering your information,
you're gathering your facts.
You're starting to see while
this may be a wireless related issue,
I have to adjust to my wireless profile,
begin capture. So at preferences,
that's where most of these starts.
So we highlighted and touched on it earlier but
you can change basically your settings,
the look and feel, the technical aspects
of how Wireshark captures such as specifics
related to the NIC card and other dynamics.
And remember, preferences can be saved
in profiles.
When you've change your preferences,
you match them up to the profiles and
and you save your changes and hopefully,
you're naming your profiles specifically
in ways that you know
what's contained within them.
So as we mentioned before,
there's preferences.You can hit shift control P.
One of the things that you may want to learn
as you move through learning Wireshark
is there's a lot of handy shortcuts, so that
you can use the keyboard very quickly
to move between the tools.
It's not a pre-requisite however
to using the tool because you can now
operate through all the menus.
However it's a, it's very easy for things
that you use very often to learn a
quick key stroke to get into them.
So you can view preferences
by going to the edit menu and you select
preferences and will open up
the preferences dialogue box
as you could see on the screen.
And in this dialogue box, there's,
there's some sections of things you can change.
So for example, in the left navigation pane,
you'll see the user interface
where you can change layout,
the columns that you view, fonting colors,
and you can also change the capture dynamics.
You can build filter expressions to be used
in that profile which we'll get to.
You make a little shortcut.
You can also do that in your capture window
and the name resolution information.
You can adjust information in the files
such as the protocols and how you see them
and some statistical information.
And again the preferences is
basically adjusting the look and feel,
the layout adjustments.
Columns are very important.
You will find that if you layout your
columns correctly, you will be able,
if you set up a filter correctly
and your column information correctly,
you will be able to quickly select the profile
and see specific things that you need to see
directly from the packets list pane.
They're very helpful. It's very efficient and
it will help solve problems quicker.
Fonts and colors, we're going to learn
how to colorize packets in a separate module.
But colorizing is very helpful, for example,
if you want things to stick out
very quickly to you.
So, you will see in the packets list pane,
that there's a default set of colors that show up.
You may see things show up yellow or pink,
and you may want to see something in big
bold red, or red highlight with black lettering
to really show what it is
that you're trying to capture.
For example, you wanted to see some
specific source destination traffic
and you want to colorize that with big bold
red or black so that you can see it
immediately in your capture pane.
That is something that you can set up in
preference and adjust to a, to save the
colorizing information and you can use
it when you load up profiles.
And you can adjust the capture specifics
as well to your user interface.
Some of the information such as the fonts and
the coloring information can be adjusted in here.
This is as I mentioned, it's, it's very important
for how you want to view things and,
the whole, the whole point of this topic is that
you want to set up Wireshark in a way
you can use it effectively and efficiently.
There was questions earlier that exams and
specifically, you know, content related to exams.
So this may seem like something
that's not important to you.
This may seem like something that
may be trivial.
This may seem like something that
may just be an exam.
And this may seem like something that
is very helpful in helping you identify traffic
quickly and easily but no matter what that is,
no matter what your purpose for doing this,
the most important thing to me,
is that I want to set up Wireshark
so that when I am in a heated battle
I am able to very quickly look at
and pull up a file, profile that matches
specific set of preferences that show me
specific things immediately
when I want to see them.
I want to filter for traffic that I want to see.
I want to pre-capture and pre-filter,
pre-filter capture traffic to not see
what it is that I don't want to see
and I want to be able to expertly
maneuver this tool in a way where someone
asks me, "Can you capture this problem?"
I can minimize and, and remove the stuff
that I don't want to see and quickly
show in Wireshark what it is that is relevant.
So back to creating a new preference for
the example that I had shown in this module.
We're just going to customize the columns
and specifically show certain things
in the packets list, packets list pane.
And it's really, really cool because
columns are very important.
You may not know but you can adjust
what you see in columns.
And you can select many other columns
than what's set there by default.
Some of the examples are specific time settings.
We will learn about absolute relative time.
However, what's important is that you can
customize and set up a column to show you
immediately what that is
right in the packets list pane,
right from the onset of your capture.
So just be aware in the preferences
that you can adjust all your columns.
You can make new columns and choose to,
to show what it is that you want to show and
to remove what it is that you don't want to show.