What I sometimes do is to generate a "marker" packet by performing some
action that generates some real network traffic. It should be something
that is very unlikely to appear during "normal" operation and that you
can easily search for in the capture later on. This has the advantage that
the user does not have to interact with ethereal and it doesn't even have
to run on the user's machine. An http access to some special (none existant)
URL on a local webserver may do the job. You could even embed a comment or
counter in the URL.
Cheers,
Bernd
---
Bernd Becker
--On Monday, June 16, 2003 12:01:31 +0200 "spam@xxxxxxxx" <spam@xxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I hope this is the proper forum for a suggested feature request? If
not, perhaps I can at least get some comments on whether this is
considered a useful feature for more users before I post to the -dev
list.
In the ethereal GUI an active logging session has a smaller pop-up
window displaying the number of packets received and a "stop" button.
I would like to have another button (e.g. named "Mark") that enables
me to insert a fake marker packet into the log. This means that I can
trace a socket over time and mark periods of waiting for the server,
as opposed to normal periods of inactivity.
Example:
A database front-end is perceived as "hanging" at times by the end
users. It is not clear whether this is a client app problem or a
server response issue. A network trace shows large deltas at times,
but some of these are normal periods of network inactivity, others
are periods of waiting for a result set. It is not easy to filter
these as the application may have many connections open in parallel.
A solution could be to install Ethereal on a test client machine
together with the application and have a user work on this for a day
or two, pressing the "Mark" button when s/he feels there is a
problem. This log, compared with datetime stamps from app log and
server log, should show exactly what was going on in the problem
periods - even if there are several problems related to network
activity.
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