Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Enabling/disabling ANY heuristic dissector
Date Index · Thread Index · Other Months · All Mailing Lists
Date Prev · Date Next · Thread Prev · Thread Next
From: Hadriel Kaplan <hadrielk@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2015 00:33:28 -0400
My 2 cents:

> On Jul 5, 2015, at 11:32 PM, Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> "Heuristic Protocol" or "Heuristic Dissector”?

While “Dissector” makes more sense to me personally, do most users/IT-folks understand what a “Dissector” is?  I think we’ve been conditioned to think of that word because we look at the code. But I could easily be wrong about that.


> Should we have a single table, listing protocols, with up to two checkboxes, one for the "identifier-based" dissector (if any; leave the checkbox out if none) and one for the heuristic dissector (if any; leave the checkbox out if none)?

I think a single table will be more confusing since several protocols have heuristic dissectors for more than one underlying transport/protocol type.  Of course we could just enable/disable a protocol’s heuristics for all underlying transports as all-onf/off... but I’m just sure someone will have some reasonable use case for enabling heuristics for some protocol over TCP but not UDP or vice-versa, and then we’d be back to creating a preference for that protocol to do so.

In fact I’d probably be one of those people: if our RTP heuristic dissector supported TCP (for RFC 4571), I’d want it kept off on TCP always, but I used to have it turned on for UDP all the time in my previous job.

-hadriel