Using Fiddler on Linux

If you are a web programmer, I am sure you would have come across a juncture where you needed some kind of tool that kept a steady eye on the network traffic. On Windows, a sexy tool that does this is Fiddler. You are using Windows, doing your programming, observing what requests flow in and out, all is well. Your boss asks you to write some kind of wise script that would some magic on the network like calling some webservice, ftp etc. You say, ‘huh… piece of cake’. Oh ya, the boss says, just one thing, this script runs on Linux.

Doh!!!!

Not really a “Doh” moment. Fiddler has a nice feature of remote connections. What you do is set the proxy on your Linux box, the proxy would have the ip address/computer name of a windows machine that is running Fiddler. That’s it, all the network traffic is routed to the Fiddler instance running on your beloved Windows machine. For those who understand in terms of some screenshots, here is the link from Fiddler website, http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler/help/hookup.asp#Q-NonWindows

In my case, I had to put the IP address of my Windows machine and the port 8888 on which Fiddler was running. Computer names might not be searchable on all networks.

Happy Programming!!!