Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Capture media page online

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2002 15:32:41 -0700
On Mon, Sep 02, 2002 at 05:17:11PM -0500, Gerald Combs wrote:
> Updates and corrections are welcome.

FreeBSD loopback: Yes.

NetBSD and OpenBSD loopback *should* work, but I haven't tested them. 
(The code path is pretty much the same for all the BSDs, although
OpenBSD has a different DLT_ value and puts the AF_ type into the packet
header in network byte order rather than host byte order; Ethereal and
libpcap should be able to cope with both.)

You might want to put in a footnote noting that "Serial" refers to PPP
and *possibly* Cisco HDLC (i.e., you can't use it to capture arbitrary
traffic, including non-networking traffic, over serial lines; we also
don't support SLIP).

Note that PPP captures on Linux are in cooked mode only - you get none
of the control-protocol traffic, just IP traffic and the like.

Some items for Digital UNIX:

		802.11	ATM	Ethernet FDDI	 Loopback Serial Token Ring

Digital UNIX	Unknown	Unknown	Yes	 Unknown Yes	 Unknown Unknown

(Of course, some of those OSes, specifically some if not all of the
commercial UNIXes, don't even *support* 802.11 cards.)

Hopefully somebody can fill in entries for MacOS X at some point.  (I
presume Ethernet is "Yes", as people have sent in fixes to the capture
code for MacOS X.  I don't know whether they support DLT_IEEE80211 for
Airport cards yet, so 802.11 might be "Unknown" or "Cooked mode only". 
Loopback is probably "Yes", as per the other BSDs.)