Download and Install Fiddler for Ubuntu (NetTool)

I was looking for an alternative for Fiddler for Ubuntu and I found a tool that was highly recommended wherever I looked. Its called NetTool and it is a java based program.

Download NetTool

NetTool is available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/nettool/. The page contains some description as well as a download link for getting the zip file.

Clicking on the download link, I saved the tool to my local machine under a NetTool folder that I had created.

Right clicking on the zip file, select the option to extract it.

Open a terminal window and navigate to the folder where the file was extracted.

First step is to enter a command to make the shell script files executable.

> chmod a+x *.sh

Now enter the command to start nettool.

> ./start-nettool.sh

This launched the nettool application that looks as following.

Now to enter the first real test. Accessing the content of a page directly.

Accessing a URL from within NetTool

Enter a URL (say, www.google.com ) on the first text box on the top-left and the console will show the html contents of the page as below.

Using the browser to navigate the site.

The next logical step is to see how we can configure our environment to work like fiddler. Fiddler, as windows developers must have experienced, allows users to enter the URL directly on the browser and the browser can continue to process the javascript or Flash/Silverlight content, where as Fiddler can log the http traffic going back and forth.

This is also possible with this tool. To test, I first configured my setup as follows. We select a “TCP tunnel” tab on the application and we enter the following details.
Listen On: All Local Addresses
Port: 7000
Tunnel to: here.com
Port:80
Then click on “Listen” as shown below

Now enter, http://localhost:7000 on your browser and Nettool will tunnel through to http://here.com as shown below

The NetTool window shows the actual content going back and forth.

Works like a charm. Not quite Fiddler but close enough.