Ethereal-dev: Re: Capturing with Win32 was Re: [ethereal-dev] Compile problem with UCD-SNMP 0.
> I have tried using the Capture function in WIN32, but it is not very
> useable. If I capture a file, Ethereal will not load it. It will hang
> somewhere in the middle.
I've had the UI lock up while the capture was in progress if packets
weren't coming in - yes, this is probably the same problem that plagued
Ethereal on Linux if you had vanilla libpcap until we jammed an explicit
select-with-a-timeout in, and that may also affect some other UNIX
platforms, but I'm not sure there's a similar workaround for Win32 - but
I don't think I've seen the hang when loading.
Just out of curiosity, what happens if you disable name resolution in
the "Display:Options" dialog box? If that makes the problem go away,
the hang is probably just the usual nasty "dead DNS server" hang,
although that hang, whilst it can slow down captures if it can't resolve
a host name, shouldn't cause the load to hang forever (the DNS lookup
will eventually time out), and I'd expect that to be more likely to
happen on a capture you got from elsewhere, not in a capture likely to
contain IP addresses only for hosts that
1) are in your domain and that would be resolved by a
more-likely-to-be-functional local DNS server
or
2) are being talked to by a nearby machine at about the same
time and thus are likely to have had their name resolved
recently
although I guess the inverse lookup could hang even if the forward
lookup doesn't.
I tend to file that one under the heading of "The Internet sucks" - DNS
servers don't work, Web servers don't work, routers don't work, there
will always be *something* getting in the way of accessing at least one
host during the course of a day....
