Welcome back for another episode of the ABC's of NSM.  What's NSM you say?  We'll go with Network and System Management, but you c ould throw Security in there as well.  We'll work our way through the alphabet over  the next several weeks looking at  tools and concepts along the way for all the administrators out     there.   By the way, you can thank Joe for the format & Don for the title  (I  couldn't for the life of me come up with one.)

Today's letter W is a two-for-one special: Wireshark & Webmin. I'll start with Wireshark (formerly Ethereal), which is a cross-platform open-source protocol analyzer.  I've used it for years for troubleshooting network and application problems, even in environments where I had commercial options.  It's a clean interface with a robust set of features.  Don't like GUIs?  No problem, use Tshark, the command-line version of Wireshark.  I've had limited success (and wonky behavior) with detailed capture filters, but the display filter capabilities are excellent.  I usually capture with tcpdump on the BIG-IP and offload the files to my Wireshark-enabled desktop for analysis.  If you're really adventurous, you can download the Wireshark plugin for the BIG-IP that will decode some additional details on connection flow identifiers.