Ethereal-users: RE: [Ethereal-users] duplicate packet removal

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Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 21:20:09 -0000
Title: Message
John,
 
> I'm going to merge files from captures on multiple interfaces. 
> Unfortunately I have some duplicates appearing in the traces I am merging.
> Has anyone seen any utility to do duplicate packet removal ?
 
I have tinkered with this sort of problem when comparing two traces of the same task taken from client and server. I was more interested in what sort of packets were being delayed in transmission. My naive solution would be to:
 
- mung the output of both files using tethereal -x and generate a single line of text per frame
- fudge the timestamps of one of the trace files so that traces are aligned properly
- sort and pipe the output through uniq
- un-mung back into a suitable format for text2pcap to read.
 
But that isn't going to work in general
- How do you ensure that the real world clocks are synced for two traces?
- How much of fudge factor is needed to comparing the timestamps of frames in the two traces?
- If trace 1 sees 2 pings to an IP address and trace 2 sees 3. How do you decide whether there were 3, 4 or 5 (or 8!) pings really?
- What if trace 1 says packet A arrived before B and trace 2 says B arrived before A?
 
It may be easier to advise you if we understood what sort of packets were being duplicated? Eg is it MAC level broadcasts, RIP updates etc, HSRP hellos? 
 
 
Alistair


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