Gerry Roston wrote:
When I run ethereal from my Wndows XP computer on home network (I have a 
netgear router that provides DHCP and DNS services), I see a broadcast 
packet every 2.5 seconds from source ximetaTe_18:02:a2 using protocol 
0x88ad. I have googled this, but have not found anything. Could some one 
please tell me what this is?
Perhaps somebody from Ximeta (or XiMeta, or XIMETA, or however they 
capitalize it) can.
The IEEE list of registered Ethernet types at
	http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/ethertype/eth.txt
says 88AD is assigned to XiMeta Technology Americas Inc., with the comment
	We are manufacturing a series of devices 
           	that are connected to the Ethernet requiring 
                    	secure data transmission.  Because of the 
                         	security reasons, the communication between
	the devices is done through a proprietary
	communication protocol instead of well known
	protocols such as IP.  We therefore need
	an Ethertype Field for the Ethernet frame
	to embed our proprietary communication protocol.
The "proprietary" part suggests that some of the security might be 
security-through-obscurity - "we're secure because we don't use that 
insecure TCP/IP!", as suggested by their page at
	http://www.ximeta.com/technology/ndas/index.php
so perhaps they won't tell you what it is, however.
Do you have one of their devices?
	http://www.ximeta.com/
If so, it's probably sending out packets looking for a server, or 
something such as that.