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

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

From: Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 21 May 2005 02:27:16 +0200
Loris Degioanni wrote:

> Packet.dll has always been present in WinPcap, but its set of
> functions changed a bit since old versions like winpcap 2.x.
> Moreover, any code based on packet.dll will of course work on windows
> only.

Yes...

> A much better solution would be to extend libpcap pcap_if with more
> fields (the MAC address, for example, is one I always missed), and
> then demand the specific libpcap implementations to optionally fill
> the fields. WinPcap would do it by calling packet.dll.

Well, the information provided is far more than that, currently more
than 60! different values.

I agree that it would be much nicer to have more info in libpcap/Winpcap
in a platform independent way (but I'm really not the man to add this to
libpcap as my unix/Linux knowledge is very limited).

Unfortunately, I don't see any attempts to add more of this info (for
more than 2 years right now) by someone else. I would call the current
available infos just almost "none existent" right now and as far as I
know (e.g.) the Linux driver implementation, lot's of these information
are not available (or simply unknown).

So, if I had to find a trade of between lot's of valuable win32 specific
infos now and a platform specific way virtually never, I know which way
to go.

Please prove me wrong, and I'll be happy to add additional libpcap info
to the Ethereal GUI ...

Regards, ULFL