EtherCurve is a tool for visualizing packets on your network. The packets are drawn using a space-filling Hilbert curve. Packets are scaled by their sizes and coloured using a qualitative colour map that can easily be customized.

• cmake >= 2.8.9 (for building the program)
• Qt >= 5.2 (for rendering)
• libpcap >= 1.3.0 (older versions should work as well because I am not doing anything special here)

After extracting the source files to a directory, the following should be sufficient to build EtherCurve:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ../
$ make

EtherCurve provides you with a prompt for choosing a network interface. Provided you do not wish to change any options, a simple ./ethercurve suffices to start the tool. See ./ethercurve -h for more options.

EtherCurve can read a text file containing RGB colours. These colours will be used for packet rendering. The file needs to consist of triples of integers in the range from 0–255. In addition, the file needs to have at least 4 lines, as EtherCurve currently knows three types of packets, i.e. TCP, UDP, ICMP, and the rest. The following is a valid file for EtherCurve:

255,0,0
0,255,0
0,0,255
255,255,255

EtherCurve is released under the MIT licence. See the file LICENCE in the source directory for details.