Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Panther won't sniff?

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

From: Justin Walker <justin@xxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2003 13:45:41 -0800

On Saturday, December 6, 2003, at 07:52 AM, Claude V. Lucas wrote:

I grabbed the newest tarball from the website ( 0.9.16 ), untarred,etc.
Ran ./configure; make. The build fails, complaining about not having
stuff to build the i386 architecture. No problem. I edit the various
Makefiles and remove references to "-arch i386". Build proceeds and
fails compilation of strncasecmp.c because it can't find an include
#include <ansidecl.h>. No problem. I commented out that line and the
build completes. sudo make install. no problems.

Regarding the "-arch", Mac OS X supports "fat" binaries, so that the same executable "blob" will run on multiple architectures. There is no need to compile "fat" unless you want this capability, so removing the "-arch" is fine, painless, and often conducive to successful builds (you need fat libraries to build fat binaries, and these aren't present unless you build 'em yourself).

As for the '#include' problems, I'm not sure. I recall, in a vague way, seeing discussions about this kind of issue, but I've lost the details. Check the darwin, fink, and darwinports archives to be sure.

In addition, you might check either DarwinPorts or Fink. They both have "ported" ethereal versions supported, which will either get you past the above, or show you how they did it.

Here's my big problem. I launch the tool from a root X window,
set my collection parameters, start the scan, packets get snarfed,
no worries. After a varying period of time ( longest ~43 minutes )
the main window vanishes. The capture window remains, with the various
counters still incrementing, so I think that it is still partially/mostly
working, although beyond control. The following error messages are
left in the root X window:

*** malloc: vm_allocate(size=131072) failed (error code=4294966995)
*** malloc[7594]: error: Can't allocate region
mach_port_type() failed (ipc/mig) wrong reply message ID
task_get_bootstrap_port() failed (ipc/mig) wrong reply message ID
Abort

I'm not a coder, so this is pretty much meaningless to me. I'd guess
a memory leak of some sort is exhausting the resource, but whaddo I know?

In order to rule out my build hacks as a source of this irritation I
downloaded & installed the latest prebuilt OS X binary from Fink, which
produces pretty much the same results as far as vanishing main window.

You should have a crash log in either ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter or /Library/Logs/CrashReporter called 'ethereal.crash.log'. That file should contain a record of all crashes, with timestamps (latest last). The record should include a stack trace, which may help you (or perhaps this list) narrow down the problem. The error seems to be Mach-specific, so you may have to take this to the darwin-development list.

Regards,

Justin

--
Justin C. Walker, Curmudgeon-At-Large  *
Institute for General Semantics        |   If you're not confused,
                                       |   You're not paying attention
*--------------------------------------*-------------------------------*