Ethereal-users: RE: [Ethereal-users] Cron job

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From: "Neulinger, Nathan" <nneul@xxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 14:15:54 -0600
I wonder - it would probably be trivial to add support to
tethereal/ethereal/tcpdump to have SIGHUP cause the server to close and
reopen the capture file. 

Doing that, you could leave the tethereal running, rename the capture file,
sighup. At that time, a new capture file would be created. 

-- Nathan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Guy Harris [mailto:guy@xxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2001 2:13 PM
> To: McNutt, Justin M.
> Cc: 'ethereal-users@xxxxxxxxxxxx'
> Subject: Re: [Ethereal-users] Cron job
> 
> 
> > Write a wrapper Perl script that does the following:
> >  
> > 1)  Uses the 'date' function to generate a file name for 
> your capture file.
> > 2)  Forks a second process.
> >       a)  Parent process simply waits for twenty-four 
> hours, then reaps the
> > child.
> 
> Well, it has to do more than just reap the child, it also has to kill
> the child first.
> 
> Tethereal and tcpdump both take SIGTERM - the default signal 
> sent by the
> "kill" command (well, unless you're running Sixth Edition, 
> but if you're
> running Tethereal or tcpdump, I really doubt you are :-)) - 
> and, if they
> get that signal, stop capturing and exit.
> 
> Note, though, that this scheme will, unless you start the next day's
> capture before killing today's capture, run the risk that you'll not
> capture packets between the time when you kill today's 
> capture and start
> tomorrow's capture.  (Starting the next day's capture first runs the
> risk that you'll get packets in both capture files, but I suspect most
> users could live with that.)
> 
> Tethereal and tcpdump should do about equally well, except that
> Tethereal doesn't force you to pass a "-s 65535" argument to 
> it in order
> to get more than a measly 68 bytes worth of packet data.
> 
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