Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] [patch] save & load hostname-cache

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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 12:24:49 -0700

On Oct 20, 2003, at 2:56 PM, Matthijs Melchior wrote:

The "Edit>Preferences>Name Resolution" dialog is extended with 2 lines,
one to show the file name and one to "Clear", "Load" or "Save" the
hostname-cache in a file. This allows you to preload the hostname-cache
with names of your choise and not having to remember the IP numbers.
And collected IP numbers [with names, if any] can be written to
a file for adding hostnames and reloading.

Hmm.

Somebody else requested that there also be a UI to let you add entries to that list by hand.

They might have cited Microsoft Network Monitor there - but NetMon lets you add more than just IPv4 address/name pairs.

Ultimately, we should, perhaps, have the ability to do so for *arbitrary* addresses - or, at least, for all address types for which we have address-to-name code.

We should also perhaps have the ability to save all those name<->address tables.

However, that then raises the question of whether they should be separate files. Network Monitor has them all in a single file, with some way (I don't remember what it is, offhand) to indicate what type of address each entry is - but Sun's snoop, which also lets you save to a file an address->name list for all IP addresses in a capture and to read such a file, only saves IP addresses in the standard hosts-file format.

I'm not sure which would be best for Ethereal as the default format, although it'd be useful if we could *read* both formats (and formats used by other capture programs, if possible) and write as many of the formats as possible.