Dear developers,
Together with a fellow student (at the University of Antwerp
(Belgium), we're working on a year programming assignment. The goal is
to write visualization tool for an mobility testbed.
I'll give you all a bit of introductory information:
- as capturing device, we decided to use ethereal (because of the nice
GUI and filter capabilities) so that we don't have to reinvent the
wheel.
- visualization tools:
* gnuplot (to draw packet/time plots);
* nam (from the nsnam project -> visualize traffic in real-time animations);
* self written tool to draw sequence diagrams (visualise traffic from
one node to others nodes in the topology, in function of time)
*...
Our task is now to glue all those components together.
What we'd like to do, is write some sort of plugin to Ethereal that
acts as a client, which main task is to deliver a server the necessary
data we need to complete the rest of the visualisation (e.g. from the
packet-list: #,time, source and destination).
The main application will get written in C++ using the Qt GUI. We're
also the abilities build in Qt (QSocketdevice, QSocketnotifier...) to
handle client/server interface.
After reading some docs about developing plugins and tapping systems,
we noticed that most of the information is concerning about new
protocol dissectors (that's not what we're looking for, isn't?) and so
we didn't found an answer to our main problem: getting data from
ethereal in a proper manner.
If this wasn't already hard enough, we also need a way to handle
events like clicking on a packet in sequence diagram -> highlight
packet details in ethereal...
(we thought to write some kind of protocol and also use sockets to get
that job done , but therefore I think we need to bind some callbacks
from Ethereal)
Is it possible to you give us some advice, how to handle this 2
problems? Best way to implement it (using plugins and making use of
tapping?)
Regards,
Koen Smets
--
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to
build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying
to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
--Rich Cook--
