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

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From: "Neulinger, Nathan" <nneul@xxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 08:55:32 -0600
I can see two issues - one - maybe the code was supposed to be
MAX(10,FOPEN_MAX) not MIN(10,FOPEN_MAX) - and secondly, the low value for
FOPEN_MAX.

I'm not sure why we'd limit it any way - if the user wants to specify to
open 10000 files and the system can't do it, ethereal/tethereal will error
out when it tries to initialize the ring buffer. It'd be one thing if
ethereal were internally triggering ring buffer usage, but it's always
controlled by the user who selects the number of files. 

-- Nathan

------------------------------------------------------------
Nathan Neulinger                       EMail:  nneul@xxxxxxx
University of Missouri - Rolla         Phone: (573) 341-4841
Computing Services                       Fax: (573) 341-4216


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Guy Harris [mailto:gharris@xxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: Friday, January 18, 2002 3:01 AM
> To: Neulinger, Nathan
> Cc: ethereal-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [Ethereal-dev] issues with tethereal and ring buffers...
> 
> 
> 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.")