Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] resolving of well-known mac-addresses

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From: Hannes Gredler <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2002 11:41:25 +0200
On Wed, Aug 28, 2002 at 02:06:49AM -0700, Guy Harris wrote:
| On Wed, Aug 28, 2002 at 10:36:58AM +0200, Hannes Gredler wrote:
| > find attached a patch that allows protocol dissectors to
| > register their well known MAC-addresses;
| 
| Hmm.
| 
| You could also add to "/etc/ethers" on UNIX systems, or to the "ethers"
| file in the Ethereal installation directory on Windows, entries for the
| MAC addresses in question; that wouldn't require any code changes.
| If it's inconvenient or undesirable to add them to "/etc/ethers" on
| UNIX, we could modify "initialize_ethers()" in "epan/resolv.c" to read a
| file in both the "get_datafile_dir()" and the "get_systemfile_dir()"
| directory, if those two routines don't return the same path (on Windows,
| they do).
| 
| We could then ship an "ethers" file with Ethereal that contains
| well-known MAC addresses - and that could be updated with no code
| changes.

no doubt ... that was the workaround in the past ...

IMHO it does make sense that these _protocol-specific_ [thats the important
keyword here] MAC-addresses are registered by the dissector;

  sure we could start messing up with files, however
  these well-known MACs are specified in ISO10589 [10 years old spec]
  and it is unlikely that they do change in the near future;

so i am in favour of hardcoding them into the protocol; the ethers files
should be used just for site-local MAC address definitions;

thoughts ?

/hannes