On Wednesday, August 27, 2003, at 11:22 AM, Dennis Halverson wrote:
Can anyone point me to some information on how a Fibre Channel
frame is encapsulated in an Ethernet frame for decoding by Ethereal?
The only forms of encapsulation for Fibre Channel frames that Ethereal
handles are:
1) FCIP - I think there are Internet-Drafts for this. That's not
directly inside Ethernet, it's inside TCP/IP, which can run over
Ethernet or PPP or....
2) "Boardwalk" - something that, I infer from the "MDS" in the
comments in the dissector code, is generated by the Port Analyzer
Adapter in their "MDS 9000 Family of Multilayer Directors and Fabric
Switches":
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/ps4159/ps4358/index.html
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/ps4159/ps4358/ps5059/index.html
It appears to use FC frames as the payload of Ethernet frames with an
Ethernet type of 0x88AE - if you're curious about it, you'll have to
ask somebody from Cisco about it (Dinesh Dutt wrote the "Boardwalk"
dissector; according to the packet-brdwlk.c code, he's at Andiamo, but
they got bought by Cisco - they might have been an "internal startup"
inside Cisco).
3) some kind of internal frames inside, I presume, some flavor of MDS
9000 machines, which are either encapsulated with an Ethernet type of
0xFCFC or a bogus Ethernet type of 0, apparently.