Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Filters question

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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 12:20:46 -0700

On Wednesday, July 2, 2003, at 2:04 AM, Anna Gangitano1 wrote:
is it possible to capture only the traffic from the usb port to the
ethernet card?

Only if the packet capture mechanism on your OS allows it.

If the machine running Ethereal is running Windows, WinPcap knows only about network interfaces and NDIS, and a USB Ethernet device is probably using Remote NDIS (in which case WinPcap will be snooping on the Ethernet card, not on the USB link); it'd be able to snoop a USB connection only if the USB connection goes through the Windows networking code, and I don't think it does.

I suspect that USB Ethernet drivers for Linux or BSD have the same limitation, and that there's no direct connection between USB and the packet capture mechanism, so they'd have the same limitations. In any case, as you said in your earlier message "I have installed Ethereal on my laptop. I have connected my pocketpc to the laptop trhough ActiveSync." I suspect the machine running Ethereal is running Windows.

Further questions about snooping USB on Windows with WinPcap-based applications such as Ethereal should be sent to winpcap-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, as that's the mailing list for WinPcap. For Linux, I'm not sure what the right mailing list would be (linux-net?); for BSD, the list would depend on the BSD you're using.

(There's no DLT_USB in any version of libpcap I've seen, which further suggests that snooping on USB connections with libpcap/WinPcap is simply not supported at all.)

Please, can someone send me some filters examples about this?

If capturing on a USB link isn't supported, there won't be any filters, as you can only use filters when capturing....