Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] Ethereal Use/Crash

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 This list is no longer active.

From: Jason House <jhouse@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2002 14:15:05 -0400
At an upcoming military exercise, the army plans to use ethereal on about a dozen laptops for network
analysis.  Unfortunately, it seems that the current downloadable binary of ethereal does not run properly on
the laptops.  Ethereal crashes before the main window even pops up.  I think it would be cool to get the army
to use ethereal as part of normal network analysis during test events... but so far I don't know how to solve
the problem of ethereal crashing...

The laptops are Toshiba Tecra 520CDT's running Windows NT 4.0 (Build 1381: Service Pack 3).  They have 32MB
RAM and 165MHz Pentium MMX processors.

The crash seems to occur rather early on from calls to GTK.  Is there a reason why GTK would work improperly
in this environment?  I poked around on the GTK site and did not find any explicit listing of what platforms
it works on.  The ethereal site does explicitly list Windows NT as a supported platform.  Do other people run
ethereal on windows NT successfully?

Jason House wrote:

> List,
>     I was trying to load ethereal on a rather old laptop running Windows
> NT 4, but it crashes inside of GTK.  The attached text file has
> information dumped from visual studio.  The last ethereal-specific call
> within the call stack is create_main_window.  Even though visual studio
> highlights the push command, I think the offensive line is
> gtk_combo_new().  I don't think that there is incorrect coding, but
> somehow relates to GTK/GDK on that laptop.  What kinds of things should
> I be trying to resolve this problem?  Anybody have a clue as to what is
> causing the problem on this particular laptop?
>
>   ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Call Stack:
> GDK-1.3! 009db7a0()
> GDK-1.3! 009db9e2()
> GDK-1.3! 009dbda9()
> GDK-1.3! 009cc09f()
> GDK-1.3! 009b2878()
> GTK-1.3! 0092c029()
> GTK-1.3! 0092f50f()
> GTK-1.3! 0096c6c4()
> GTK-1.3! 0096a589()
> GTK-1.3! 008ebebc()
> GTK-1.3! 00921228()
> GTK-1.3! 0091eb6a()
> GTK-1.3! 0095f542()
> GTK-1.3! 0095f505()
> GTK-1.3! 0089fc37()
> GTK-1.3! 0094b3d5()
> GTK-1.3! 008a00d1()
> create_main_window(int 280, int 95, int 75, _e_prefs * 0x0084f900) line 2381 + 5 bytes
> main(int 0, char * * 0x00ae0764) line 1877 + 30 bytes
> WinMain(HINSTANCE__ * 0x00400000, HINSTANCE__ * 0x00000000, char * 0x00141881, int 1) line 2103 + 23 bytes
> ETHEREAL! WinMainCRTStartup + 308 bytes
> KERNEL32! 77f1b304()
>
> The local assembly in create_main_window:
> 005CA964   call        _gtk_box_pack_start (00615edc)
> 005CA969   add         esp,14h
> 005CA96C   mov         edx,dword ptr [filter_bt]
> 005CA96F   push        edx
> 005CA970   call        _gtk_widget_show (00615eee)
> 005CA975   add         esp,4
> 005CA978   call        _gtk_combo_new (00616044)
> 005CA97D   mov         dword ptr [filter_cm],eax
> 005CA980   push        offset finfo_selected+0Ch (0084a0b0)
> 005CA985   mov         eax,dword ptr [filter_list]
> 005CA988   push        eax
> 005CA989   call        _g_list_append (006165f6)