[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Feb 08, 2003 at 11:41:25AM -0800, Carol Roberts wrote:
> Sorry if this question sounds totally ignorant...  I've only recently been
> introduced to Ethereal and am working in a group which uses SNA (which I
> have NO experience with).  I wanted to find out if Ethereal can be used for
> doing traces on an SNA network and if so, are there any plugins needed.

Ethereal has some code to dissect some SNA traffic.  However, it
currently only recognizes SNA traffic if:

	it's running over PPP with a protocol number of hex 4D;

	it's running over 802.2 LLC on top of, for example, Ethernet,
	FDDI, Token Ring, or 802.11;

	it's running on top of X.25;

	it's running on top of serial SDLC *in a capture from a
	Sniffer*.

> Also, does Ethereal support tracing on serial lines (specifically RS485).

It supports capturing traffic on network interfaces on the machine on
which Ethereal is running; it doesn't support any "passive tap" hardware
devices for capturing traffic on serial lines that aren't being used as
network interfaces.