Ethereal-users: Re: [ethereal-users] Decoders development

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 23:37:11 -0800
> Where can I find any tutorials on how to write my own packet decoder for
> ethereal.

Unfortunately, there aren't any.  The closest we have is the
"proto_tree" file in the "doc" subdirectory, which gives some
information on how to construct the "protocol tree", which is what the
middle pane displays, but doesn't give other information, such as how to
plug a dissector for a given protocol into the dissector for the
protocol(s) in which that protocol is encapsulated.

I've archived some mail to "ethereal-dev@xxxxxxxx" (if you're writing a
protocol dissector, you may want to join that list, which is for
developers) that gives some tutorial code; I'll look into turning that
into some more material to put into the "doc" directory, and will mail
anything I produce from that to you.

> We have developed an in-house
> message broker, and I would like to extend ethereal to display these
> packets in a nice format.

If it's a dissector for an in-house protocol, you might want to make it
a "plugin" that gets dynamically loaded, rather than something compiled
into Ethereal; unfortunately, we don't have documentation on how to
produce a plugin, we just have an example of a plugin in the
"plugins/gryphon" directory.