On Sat, Aug 28, 1999 at 05:25:52AM -0500, Jochen Friedrich wrote:
>
>
> I'm very interested in this RMON topic myself as we plan to provide some
> RMON functionality for gxsnmp, as well. In gxsnmp, we have written an
> asynchronous SNMP layer which uses the glib event loops. This might be
> interesting to do non-blocking SNMP operations. The SNMP layer is BTW
> partly derived from btng :)
Yes, I was perusing the gxsnmp code last night, and looking at the async
snmp library you have there. Gxsnmp and Ethereal are in a position to
offer each other some needed functionality. I'm sure that gxsnmp wants
to stay an SNMP management application, and not delve too deeply into
packet decoding. And Ethereal should stay focused on packet captures,
decoding, and analysis, but not delve too much into the world
of SNMP management.
Once RMON captures are available in gxsnmp, it would be great for you
to use Ethereal to actually decode the capture. Perhaps you just execute
ethereal on your capture file, or maybe some GNOME programmer would write
an IDL interface to Ethereal's packet decoding engine, but somehow
gxsnmp should take advantage of Ethereal's decoding ability.
Likewise, gxsnmp already has the async snmp library using the glib event loop.
Perhaps ethereal could use your library, or a subset of it, to do the
RMON capture. And if the gxsnmp developers added some rmon-specific functions
to the library, then hey! it would be even easier for Ethereal.
Should ethereal be able to use libgxsnmp without much difficulty? or is
that library overkill ... does it contain dependencies on database
access libraries, like libmysqlclient? I see in the gxsnmp/lib directory
there are some sql-related files.
> One other nice feature would be for wiretap to grok the format used by
> netfilter devices of the new 2.3.x netfilter code. This would make
> ethereal a cool tool to analyze firewall logs :)
Can you send me a sample log? I haven't set up netfilter on my linux 2.3.x
machine, since my 2.3.x machine is not my firewall/router.
--gilbert
