Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] problems with sunfreeware installation

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 This list is no longer active.

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 13:42:59 -0700 (PDT)
> I am running Solaris 8. I downloaded and installed ethereal from the
> www.sunfreeware.com. When I try to run the ethereal program, I get the
> following errors

I think those are due to a problem with NET-SNMP 4.2 - I'd installed 4.2
on a machine at home, and saw the problem there, but when I installed
4.2.1 and rebuilt, the problem went away.

> and a core dump:

This is not necessarily at all connected with the other errors.

The version of Ethereal from sunfreeware.com is an old version, and may
have a number of bugs wherein Ethereal takes pointers into the packet
and treats them as if they pointed to 2-byte or 4-byte integral
quantities, rather than using tvbuffs or using the "pntohl()",
"pntohs()", "pletohl()", or "pletohs()" macros; that may work on Intel
x86 processors, but it doesn't work on most RISC processors unless the
compiler generates code to make it work (i.e., code that doesn't just do
a load instruction, assuming you can get the compiler to generate that
type of code).

The Written Word have binary packages of Ethereal 0.8.16; for Solaris
8, see

	ftp://ftp.thewrittenword.com/packages/free/by-name/ethereal-0.8.16/sparc-sun-solaris2.8/

0.8.16 may well have fewer unaligned-pointer-dereferencing bugs.