Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Etheral 0.10.4 Suggestions and Thoughts.
Alan Jones wrote:
I was working with Etheral .10.4 and had a few thoughts, suggestions, etc....
Now that the Menu items Statistics -> Conversations & Statistics -> Endpoints have the tabs for Ethernet, Fiber Channel, IP, IPX etc, it seems like the menu items Statistics -> Conversation Lists -> <items> and Statistics -> Endpoints Lists -> <items> could be removed as everything seems redundant.
As these menu items are redundant, that still can be a thing for very
long capture files (several 100 MB), where every additional piece of
code will be slow down things.
Of course, the current structure of the menu seem's to be not well
designed by me to reflect things right now.
It would be Nice if the columns in the Conversation and Statistics tabs could be resized.
The columns are automatically resized by GTK and should display all the
data required. The formerly used static sizes don't work well together
with the name resolution, as the sizes of the resolved names will vary a
lot.
I would also think several would be able to benefit from being able to copy the data from the Endpoints and Conversations tabs to clipboard or save as a file in a CSV format or something so the data could be imported into Excel or OOo Calc for sorting and comparing and calculating.
Yes I've heard that before. As I don't have use of this, maybe you would
like to start implementing this export feature :-) ?
I have not been able to figure out Etheral's name resolution options compared to other network sniffing tools like Capsa. Etheral seems to resolve our server names, but not most of our machine names. Is this a DNS vs Netbios thing? Capsa the other program I have used that is like Etheral seems to be able to resolve our local machine names. Is anyone working on improving the name resolution?
Is the name resolution working for the main screen and only missing in
the statistics windows? If it's working ok in the packet list and only
fail to work with the statistics, that's easy to explain. I've only
implemented the name resolution for the protocols I use, know and can
test in the statistics.
AFAIK, Ethereal is only doing a DNS name resolve, so if your DNS server
don't know the machines name, Ethereal won't show it. Netbios might
resolve the names, but won't be portable to other platforms very well.
The Conversations list bytes and Packets items might be easier if the column labels could be made more clear if the packets and bytes were going from A to B or B to A etc.
Could you make a detailed suggestion for better column names?
Regards, ULFL
