Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] TDS decoding

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> My question is, does it make sense to make netlib its own dissector?

It sounds as if netlib and TDS bear somewhat the same relationship to
one another as does the NetBIOS Session Service protocol and SMB; as
such, I might be inclined to make netlib a separate protocol from TDS.

> And, how do other protocols deal with a trace that may start somewhere in the 
> middle, missing important data from the start of the stream?

By giving up if they can't handle it, or by offering, say, a protocol
preference item to allow a user to supply information that can't be
inferred from the capture.  (We may want to have some way of specifying
per-conversation information, separate from global preferences, for
this.  Such a mechanism doesn't currently exist.)