Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] finding iSCSI PDUs

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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2003 12:45:22 -0700

On Sep 16, 2003, at 12:11 PM, Eddy Quicksall wrote:

It is sometimes hard to find all iSCSI PDU headers with Ethereal. The reason is that some captured lines will contain several headers but only the first header is displayed.

What do you mean by a "captured line"? Do you mean a captured link-layer frame?

If so, do you mean that there's more than one iSCSI PDU in a TCP segment? If so, then, although not all of them would necessarily be displayed in the summary line for the frame, all of them should be dissected in the protocol tree display (the middle pane of the display). By "only the first header is displayed", do you mean only the first PDU is described in the Info column of the display?

Given that, I would like to write a program to extract all packets for port 3260 and pick out all PDU headers.

Does anyone know where I can look to see the format of an Ethereal file (I'm using Windows XP)?

The format of an Ethereal capture is libpcap format; files in that format can be read by libpcap/WinPcap. See the documentation for WinPcap at

	http://winpcap.polito.it/docs/man/html/index.html

Note, however, that to find the iSCSI PDU headers, your program will have to do all the work that Ethereal does....