Wireshark · Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] resolving HW (MAC) addresses

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> But i really want to resolve Ethernet MAC addresses into IP addresses or
> into host names.

The *ONLY* way you get that in Ethereal is if Ethereal happens to see an
ARP packet that specifies that a given MAC address is the MAC address
for a given IP address.  There is no other way to do that.

> Maybe i did not make this clear. Yes Ethereal does resolve
> IP addresses into host name under some circumstances in my setup.
> 
> But my current problem is that it is unable to display the IP addresses of
> certain packets (MPLS)

What do you mean by "unable to display the IP addresses"?

If you mean there is no IP address field in the IP header, as dissected
by Ethereal, that's an Ethereal bug.

If you mean that there is an IP address field but it doesn't show the
corresponding host name, that's the problem I was talking about - *if
the code on your OS that Ethereal depends on to resolve IP addresses to
host names, using DNS or NIS or whatever, cannot do so, there's nothing
Ethereal can do about it*, and you'll have to try to fix whatever DNS
problem, or whatever, is preventing it from doing so.