Ethereal-users: RE: [Ethereal-users] Capturing ATM traffic

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From: "David O'Shea" <doshea@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 14:53:34 -0700 (PDT)
On Wed, 26 Sep 2001 ethereal-users-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> From: "Giles Scott" <gscott2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: Allan Silverstein <allan@xxxxxxxx>,
> 	tom greaser <tgreaser@xxxxxxxxxxx>, Raghu Arni <arni@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: ethereal-users <ethereal-users@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: RE: [Ethereal-users] Capturing ATM traffic
> Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 18:32:23 +0100
>
> Hi
>
> For Optical Traffic;
> We used to use optical spiltters which would - split the light so an
> analyser could see all the traffic between two stations. They were quite
> expensive I think around $1000 USD. Sorry can't remember the manufacturer.
>
> You would need two ATM cards in the PC. With TX from one source into RX on
> the first card, same on the other ATM card.

	I don't know if this is possible, but I know when you use a
protocol analyzer (e.g. from Agilent) you can put it inline on one of the
fibers, so perhaps you could do a similar thing with Ethereal:

1. connect transmit port of one end of the ATM link to receive port of the
ATM NIC, and transmit port of the ATM NIC to the receive port on the other
end of the link.
2. assuming that the hardware supports this, transmit all received packets
straight back out with exactly the same headers, so that it is as if your
workstation was not even part of the link.  This would probably require
you to write some sort of special driver, but it might be easier than the
normal case of writing a driver if constructing packets with the exact
headers you want is possible.
3. run Ethereal on the interface your driver created.

	I guess if you're not a kernel hacker, this option isn't available
to you!  Maybe someone here can comment on whether it would be feasible to
d this or if I'm just crazy.  As a test case, I might try it for Ethernet
on Linux one day.

Regards,
David