Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] Summary statistics + Data in filtered packets

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From: Jean-Michel Fayard <jmfayard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2003 15:52:34 +0200 (DST)
Hello

We have used ethereal since ~ 2 month in Alcatel (France) to test our
what we call "core network", a thing which take place in the future UMTS
networks.  We have a lot of traffic, espacially HTTP, WAP, DHCP, a few
others and some garbage. To test if our network respond well, we enjoyed
to use ethereal as a (not-so) basic statistic tool and then give a look
at the list of packets if _something_ doesn't work.  To achieve that,
I've modified ethereal, and now I would be glad if my contribution
(under GPL) can be useful to the community.

The first thing I wanted to do was to measure the average flow of
WAP traffic. I began to consider to use the tapping interface, but
then this feature seems to be very generic, and most of the
work was already done in the Tools > Summary window

This is also my proposal patch : we have some useful data statistics in
this window (Time between first and last packet, packet count, avg.
packets/sec, byte of traffic,...) This add the same statistics about
data in packets who match the current display filter. To avoid too much
GUI bloat, this window is just like before.

=> It's simple : to measure my flow of WAP traffic, I just have
to use the "wap-wsp" filter, and see the Avg. packets/sec and
the Avg. bytes/sec
=> It's powerful since you can use all the ethereal's filter
syntax
eg. :
* Hown many time did fetchmail take to retrieve all my mails ?
filter "pop", and see "Time between first and last packet"
* Hown many HTTP erros did occur ?
filter "http.response.method >= 400 and http.response.method <
600" and see the packet count ....

=> the patch itsef is simple
It consists of the files : summary.[ch].diff and gtk/summmary_dlg.c
of the patches.tar.bz2  archive. (The rest is relevant for my next mail)

Disadvantage : it does _not_ update in real time.

-- 
FAYARD Jean-Michel <jean-michel.fayard@xxxxxxxxxx
ALCALTEL (Velizy, France)

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