Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Flow characteristics

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2005 11:31:10 -0700
Isara Anantavrasilp wrote:

I would like to know if there is anyway to obtain some information of each connection (or flow or I think it is called "conversation" in Ethereal).

I amusing Windows version of Ethereal.
In Conversations window, one can obtain some relavant info such as source/destination addresses, ports, packets sent and received, etc. However, in my application, I need more details of each connection, namely, application name (who opened the connection),

You're not going to get that if you're reading a capture file of packet data - that information isn't available in the packet data.

In theory, it might be possible, on some operating systems, get that information while the traffic is being captured *IF* the packet is being sent to or from the machine running Ethereal - of course, that would only give you the name of the application that has that connection open; if it was the peer that opened the connection, you wouldn't be able to get that information without some protocol being available on the peer to ask it what process has a particular address/port connection endpoint.

However, Ethereal doesn't support that, and I don't know of any projects to add that. There *might* be programs that get that sort of information; you might want to look at

	http://www.sysinternal.com/

for utilities to do that on Windows.

average bandwidth and if it could, peak bandwidth and burst rate.

Some raw numbers are available from the Statistics->Conversations menu item; more statistics, and a way to request statistics for a particular conversation rather than statistics about all conversations, might be useful.

I don't know whether ntop:

	http://www.ntop.org/

would provide those statistics.