Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Outgoing Traffic Behaviour

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

Date Index Thread Index Other Months All Mailing Lists
Date Prev Date Next Thread Prev Thread Next
From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 10:03:30 -0800
gpaz@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:


A big question - what is Ethereal doing while capturing that somehow
ordered or priortized the outbound packets such that the connection worked
as perfectly as possible?  Something very important was happening while
capture was active!  I need to duplicate this activity all time.
What Ethereal's doing while capturing packets is, well, capturing packets - it doesn't include any code to do the low-level packet capture, it just includes calls to libpcap/WinPcap to capture traffic.
What libpcap/WinPcap does depends on the OS you're running; on UN*Xes, it just uses OS-native mechanisms, and, on Windows, it uses the WinPcap driver, which uses OS-native mechanisms.
Try capturing with tcpdump/WinDump; you'll probably see the same effects. If so, this might be an issue of something the packet capture mechanism is doing. If it's UN*X, you'd have to ask whoever's UN*X it is; if it's Windows, you'd have to ask the WinPcap developers.