Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] New Dissector: Dumb Question

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 12:32:28 -0800
Alex Kirk wrote:

Autogen.sh was the ticket here -- I first tried modifying
epan/dissectors/Makefile.in, configuring & making, and got the same result;
however, re-running autogen.sh (which added a lot more to
epan/dissectors/Makefile* than I would have known to add) got it to compile in.

Let me follow up, though, by asking what I've done wrong in terms of
registration to have my new protocol not appear in my new copy of Ethereal --
not automatically, not in "Decode As...", nowhere.

So by "was the ticket here" what do you mean, if the dissector still isn't showing up?

Try removing epan/dissectors/register.c and rebuilding; the Makefile probably says that it depends on all the dissectors it knows about, but if its mod time is greater than that of all the dissectors in question, *even if it wasn't built using all the dissectors*, it won't be rebuilt.

Frankly, I have a feeling that I'm conflicting with some already-registered
protocol: I'm doing a (very basic so far) WINS decoder,

I assume "WINS" here is the protocol used by WINS servers to replicate their database to other servers, rather than the NetBIOS Name Service protocol, as described in RFC 1001 and 1002, used to query NetBIOS name servers.

and I'm trying to set it
up on TCP port 42, which Ethereal already IDs as "nameserver".

That's because the "services" file on most UN*Xes, and possibly on most versions of Windows as well, has an entry for port 42 as "nameserver", with the comment "Host Name Server". The page at

	http://www.seifried.org/security/ports/0/42.html

speaks of it as being for "Microsoft WINS server replications server port | Host Name Server IEN 116". The "nameserver" refers to the second of those two; IEN 116 is at

	http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/ien/ien116.txt

and dates back to August 1979.  The author of IEN 116 said back in 1986, in

	http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/misc/tcp_ip/8602.mm.www/0096.html

"Please kill any implementation of IEN 116.


All translation of host or domain names to IP Internet addresses should use the domain name service described in RFCs 882, 883, 920, 973, and 974."

As far as I know, Ethereal has no dissector for the IEN 116 name server protocol.