Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] Re: [Ethereal-users] Query - Bug reports go where?

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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 22:22:31 -0700

On Thursday, August 28, 2003, at 9:34 AM, Paul Thrower wrote:

Having just downloaded Ethereal 0.9.14 for Win32 to test a SNMP utility I'm writing, I'm convinced I've come across a bug with Ethereal's SNMP protocol decode, and I'd like to report it....but to whom do I address bug reports?

ethereal-dev. This is mentioned in the README file that's part of the Win32 installation package; I don't know whether we mention it anywhere else, though. A number of packages, when installed, pop up a window showing release notes or a README file or something such as that; perhaps we should, if possible, have NSIS do that with the README file when you install Ethereal.

If anyone is interested, here's what I've noticed :-
When sending an SNMP datagram containing a SET PDU, and the PDU contains a NEGATIVE integer, Ethereal's GUI decode tells me it's a POSITIVE number. E.G. Object is set to -2, but Ethereal displays 254. The object *is* encoded correctly, E.G 0x02 01 FE, meaning 'Integer','Short Definite Length of 1 octet' and the 2's compliment version of -2. ASN1 BER rules state since the MS bit is set, this is a negative integer....

I think I know what might be causing this (in "asn1_int32_value_decode()", the

	*integer = (gint) ch;

doesn't, I think, sign-extend enything - "ch" is a "guchar", so it's a number from 0 to 255, and, as that value can be represented in a "gint32" ("integer" is a "gint32 *"), its value is directly assigned.

If, however, it were

	*integer = (gchar) ch;

the conversion is, according to ANSI C89, implementation-defined for values from 128 to 255. However:

1) there's no easy "right" way to do it ("asn1_octet_decode()" takes, as its second argument, a "guchar *", so you're cheating if you pass a pointer to a "gchar")

and

2) on two's complement implementations, the conversion is probably the result of just assigning the bits, which is what we want

so that's probably the best answer.

I don't know for certain that's the problem, though, so:

Capture file in libcap format and screenshot available on request.

...a copy of the capture file would be helpful, for testing.