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