Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] Some thoughts...

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From: PC Drew <drewpc@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 12:26:05 -0600
I've got a bunch of ideas that I wanted to run by you guys before I started to implement them:
1.  It'd be nice if the port numbers were on the summary line of the RTP 
header...does anyone mind if I add this?
2.  I'd like to add the call id to the end of the summary line on a SIP 
message, and also parse out the header into a variables (i.e. sip.call_id) 
so that they can be easily filtered.
3.  Right now (as I understand it), with tethereal you have "on" and "off" 
as to the verbosity level (either summary line or the whole tree).  I'd 
like to make 2 changes if everyone's okay.  I'd like the ability to 
specifiy "decode from this protocol down" in the tree.  Meaning, if I'm 
looking at a SIP message, I only want to see the SIP stuff (and anythinb 
below it in the tree), but I don't want to see the tcp/udp, ip, or 
etherenet decodes.  Secondly, it'd be nice if you could print out certain 
variables in addition to the summary line.  If I can filter based on the 
variable, why not allow people to print it out?  This way, I could print 
only the summary line, but I could also see certain variables (i.e. 
udp.srcport, sip.msg_hdr, etc).
4.  The concept of dissector summary statistics seems to be missing.  For 
instance, I want to be able to display statistics related to the RTP 
conversations that have been captured (i.e. jitter, packet loss, latency, 
etc).  I've been working on implementing this and I'll send my work to the 
group when I've got a working copy.  Basically, it's setup just like the 
protocol registration...you call "register_summary" in the proto_register_* 
routine, giving it certain parameters that tell the system which functions 
to call to get the summary information for that protocol.  Then, it's up to 
the dissector to update the summary information for itself, and finally, 
when the user wants to view the summary information for that protocol, the 
system calls a "get_summary"-ish function and hands the function a 
GtkWidget  that's inside a newly created window for the dissector to 
display its stuff (i.e. numbers, graphs, images, etc).  Don't worry, I've 
also accounted for tethereal :)
That's it for now...questions, ideas, cheap-shots, and one-liners are all 
desired.
--
PC Drew

  Be nice, or I'll replace you with a very
  small shell script