I tried the IDL dissector yesterday.
It took me lots and lots of work to get this to work since I'm
not familiar with the Ethereal sources but I finally managed and the
results were impressive! The biggest problem was that
I didn't notice the giop dissector had to be replaced with the
new ones - maybe this could be stated explicitely in the
readme files. Docs could also tell where the new .c file has to
be included in the Makefile.am to make testing this out a
breeze for newbies. Other than those issues installation
was quite straightforward.
Nevertheless, impressive work! Naturally the best solution
would be to have a dissector to which one could load the actual
IDL file that would then be interpreted, but this would require
enormous amount of effort. Btw, is there such a functionality
in any of the commercial analyzers? However, in a professional
development environment it's easy to automate compilation
of a custom Ethereal build whenever the IDLs change.
Keep up the great work!
// Pasi Kovanen