Wireshark not equal to filter

Posted on June 1, 2015

I came across this today and thought I’d share this helpful little wireshark capture filter. Based on wireshark’s documentation if you use

“ip.addr != 10.10.10.10” that should show you everything except for packets with the IP addrress 10.10.10.10. The problem is … it doesn’t work. It turns yellow like this, and doesn’t filter that IP.

The trick is to negate the whole statement, then it will work. Instead of doing “ip.addr!=10.10.10.10” run “!ip.addr==10.10.10.10”. Wireshark then is able to read it as NOT  ip equal to, instead of IP is not equal to. Once you do that, you’re golden (well, green).

Simple enough, and it works with any statement — IE if you RDP into a machine and run a capture you should probably include “!tcp==3389” somewhere in your filter statement.

I hope I’ve made your day, at least a little bit easier!