Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] WLAN Protocol ID's (PID)

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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 12:07:01 -0700

On Sep 9, 2003, at 12:05 PM, bejay wrote:

Does anybody have or know where I can get a list
of WLAN Protocol ID's (PID's) and what they mean.

By "WLAN" do you mean "802.11"?

And, if so, then by "Protocol ID's" do you mean the only protocol IDs I know of in 802.11, i.e. the protocol ID that appears in an 802.2 LLC+SNAP header that follows the 802.11 header?

If so, then:

	1) they're not "WLAN protocol IDs", they're SNAP protocol IDs;

2) there isn't *a* list - the interpretation of the protocol ID depends on the OUI that precedes the protocol ID;

	3) not all of those lists are available.

If the OUI is 00:00:00, then the protocol ID is an Ethernet protocol type. There isn't a list I know of that includes *all* of them, but you might look at:

	http://www.iana.org/assignments/ethernet-numbers

	http://www.cavebear.com/CaveBear/Ethernet/type.html

although note that they just give names for the protocols; you'd have to search for documentation on the protocol yourself (and many of those protocols might not be publicly documented). There's also an "official" list at

	http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/ethertype/type-pub.html

but it just gives the organization to which the type field belongs, it doesn't actually describe the protocol (be careful about inferring the protocol from the type field - 0x0800 belongs to Xerox, but it's not the type field for a Xerox protocol, it's the type field for IP.

For other OUIs, the OUI is typically one belonging to a company; some OUI (vendor) code lists are:

	http://www.cavebear.com/CaveBear/Ethernet/vendor.html

	http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/oui.txt

but there isn't necessarily a list of protocol IDs for that particular OUI (I don't know of any).