Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Google "Summer of code"

[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Cohen wrote:

>    Or simply some equivalent wrapping around the same concept from the
>    GUI? (would be really nice if ethereal could read from a pipe into
>    a memory map so you dont need a temp file at all).

What if you have a long-running capture that captures more data than 
fits in the address space (i.e., what if an attempt to mallocate the 
next buffer for the capture fails?)?

>    Alternatively use something like SSL for example to do the same
>    thing? It all comes down to the basic unix philosophy of small tools
>    to do small tasks. For example if ethereal gui had an option like
>    "launch external command to obtain capture"

An option such as "capture on the device "ssh://{hostname}/en0" - or, 
even better, "capture on {hostname}'s device 'en0' using ssh" - rather 
than "run this command" - might be nicer.  (Having machines able to 
advertise their ability to do that via SLP or DNS service discovery or 
something such as that, might be even spiffier, as that'd let the GUI 
have a drop-down list of hosts - you'd still want to allow typing in a 
host name there, so you can handle hosts not advertising their services. 
 You'd also want a way to, for a given host, get a list of interfaces 
it supports.)