Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Win32 only: very detailed NDIS network driver information ava
Ulf,
Ulf Lamping wrote:
Loris Degioanni wrote:
Packet.dll has always been present in WinPcap, but its set of
functions changed a bit since old versions like winpcap 2.x.
Moreover, any code based on packet.dll will of course work on windows
only.
Yes...
A much better solution would be to extend libpcap pcap_if with more
fields (the MAC address, for example, is one I always missed), and
then demand the specific libpcap implementations to optionally fill
the fields. WinPcap would do it by calling packet.dll.
Well, the information provided is far more than that, currently more
than 60! different values.
Probably more, but be careful: most of them are optional, and almost no
boards implement them.
Moreover, a lot of them are very techincal (winpcap just opens a
connection to NdisRequest, which is used by protocol or intermediate
drivers to query NIC drivers) and are of few interest to user level users.
If you apply these restrictions, you start to fit a lot better inside
pcap_if.
I agree that it would be much nicer to have more info in libpcap/Winpcap
in a platform independent way (but I'm really not the man to add this to
libpcap as my unix/Linux knowledge is very limited).
Unfortunately, I don't see any attempts to add more of this info (for
more than 2 years right now) by someone else. I would call the current
available infos just almost "none existent" right now and as far as I
know (e.g.) the Linux driver implementation, lot's of these information
are not available (or simply unknown).
So, if I had to find a trade of between lot's of valuable win32 specific
infos now and a platform specific way virtually never, I know which way
to go.
Please prove me wrong, and I'll be happy to add additional libpcap info
to the Ethereal GUI ...
I don't think it's a matter of proving anything. I'm very Windows
oriented, probably even more than you, but I just gave my 2 cents about
how I'd like the thing to look.
Said that, I'm very happy about any addition to Ethereal you want to
make, especially because I added this precise feature to Analyzer 6
years ago.
just be careful to check the version of packet.dll you use, and to
inform the users *very clearly* about the winpcap version they'll have
to install, because your code will not be compatible with past versions.
If you don't do that, the users will see "random" crashes in packet.dll,
and they will almost surely complain with me and the other winpcap
developers...
Loris
Regards, ULFL
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