Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] issues with tethereal and ring buffers...

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 01:00:44 -0800
On Thu, Jan 17, 2002 at 09:11:59PM -0600, Nathan Neulinger wrote:
> looks like the MAX setting for files is set to the minimum of 10 and
> FOPEN_MAX, but FOPEN_MAX is defined to be 16 on the linux includes I
> have. That bears no relation to the actual number of files that can be
> opened. Why limit it? wouldn't it be better to use sysconf or getrlimit?

If there's a UNIX-compatible system on the planet, capable of supporting
Ethereal, with a default maximum number of open files less than 10, I'm
curious why it's so limited.  I think it was higher than that in the
Bell Labs Research release accompanied by the manual "The UNIX
Time-Sharing System, Seventh Edition" (I seem to remember it being
boosted some time between V6 and V7), and that ran on Boring Old
PDP-11's, so unless we're talking Linux or BSD on a Palm, I suspect we
can handle 10 ring buffer files with no problem.  :-)

(No, a sniffer on a handheld isn't a crazy idea:

	http://chocobospore.org/mognet/

"Mognet is a free, open source wireless ethernet sniffer/analyzer
written in Java.  It is licensed under the GNU General Public License. 
It was designed with handheld devices like the iPaq in mind, but will
run just as well on a desktop or laptop.")