Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Re: [Ethereal-cvs] rev 13827: /trunk/epan/dissectors/: packet

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 15:46:54 -0800
Michael Tuexen wrote:

If a tap needs port numbers and addresses of a packet should these be
provided by the data passed to the tap or should the tap code get the
data from the pinfo variable?

With tunneling, there could be more than one port number or network-layer address; the tap should get them from the data passed to the tap, so it gets the addresses and port numbers corresponding to the tap data in question.

Another question related to the last commit:

What is a 'conversation'?
For TCP a conversation seems to be a TCP connection. But what is a conversation for SCTP? An SCTP association (=connection) has one port number on each side (like TCP) but a list of IP-addresses. So does one SCTP association with n and m addresses
at each side correspond to one conversation or n*m conversations?

"Conversations" mainly exist for the benefit of protocols running above the transport layer, to store per-"session" information and to establish per-"session" protocol bindings (the conversation dissector).

If protocols running atop SCTP would want that information to be per-association, an conversation in SCTP should correspond to an association - that'd require a new type of "conversation".