["Ronnie Sahlberg" <ronnie_sahlberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "Philip"
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2003 8:03 PM
Subject: Re: [Ethereal-users] Does Ethereal support the 'real' ARCNet?


> ah rigtht, many thanks!
> so you think Ethereal will decode every ARCNet specific flag like 'ack,
nak,
> eot, ...'?

Ethereal has a decoder that dissects the frame format that is described in:
http://www.zvon.org/tmRFC/RFC1201/Output/chapter2.html

I.e. the Data Packets of ARCNet.
Ethereal does not have a decoder for ACK, NACK,EOT or ENQ "packets".

Since ACK, NACK packets are 1 byte in size
and EOT and ENQ packets are 3 bytes in size it would be trivial to add
decoding of these packets to
ethereal,  IF capture files containing such "packets" are available to test
with.


However:
You might need special hardware/software to take the capture.
Both Linux and BSD seems to provide "cooked" data to the capturing
application  so on those platforms
you can not capture the ACK, NACK, EOT, ENQ frames at all, since the
Linux/BSD drivers will not pass them on to the
capture application.

I.e. if ethereal is enhanced to be able to dissect such packets that are
store in a capture file,  the issue is  How do you create the capture file?
How do you actually capture from the wire in order to store it in a capture
file?