Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] Win32 only: very detailed NDIS network driver information availab

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From: Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 21 May 2005 00:48:45 +0200
Hi List!

And yet another new feature I had a long time on my personal wish list ...

As I'm working on this for about two (or more?) weeks on this, and I'm
planning to fix some reported problems with the capturing engine, here's
the first implementation of a very detailed information from the NDIS
network driver information (have to get my personal source tree again in
sync with latest...).

What it's doing:

In the Capture Interfaces dialog, I've added a new "Details" button for
every interface, which - if pressed - will show a dialog with some very
detailed information about that interface.

As I only work with Ethernet and WLAN interfaces, "only" these
interfaces are displayed. Others could be added on demand (and where
info is available) later.

How it's doing it:

The WinPcap library has a dll called packet.dll for low level access to
the network devices (which itself uses it for the higher level
wpcap.dll). This dll contains a function called PacketRequest to access
the NDIS network card driver. Through this way all the "official"
functions (status, statistics, ...) of the network driver are available.

Drawbacks:

WinPcap marks the packet.dll as "*we don't grant that the packet.dll API
will not be changed in the future releases*". However, as the
informations gathered through this method are really invaluable, IMHO
it's worth to use it anyway.

I don't know if the packet.dll was already available in the WinPcap 2.x
releases, so there might be problems around.

To Do:

- add other interface types than Ethernet and WLAN
- add an update every x seconds (currently static content on the dialog
box) function


Please report any problems,

Regards, ULFL