Title: Ethereal byte miscounting & other errors
Ethereal is a great tool, but, on the current 0.10.6 release, there are some obvious issues, one serious...
1) The Help--About pull down can't be copied & pasted as text, for example here, to easily communicate version info.
2) The DLC display makes the statement: "xx bytes on the wire". It is incorrect for Ethernet packets with padding, since it makes statements like: "54 bytes on the wire", which is obviously incorrect. If "on the wire" statements are to be made, then the software should not mislead the user, and should include what is delivered by a MAC as a Datalink frame -- 60 or 64B minimum for Ethernet, depending on whether you want to say "on the wire" should include the CRC or not (most commercial products do not).
3) Ethereal installed on a particular machine misreports the size of outgoing packets, because it removes known padding. Padding is thus disguised outbound. Inbound, it's correctly included as part of a received DLC packet. Someone needs to avoid trying to be too smart, or at least provide an option that makes the in/out pkt sizes the same for the same DLC packet.
The latter causes confusion to users and wastes considerable time chasing non problems. Thanks for your time,
Alex
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Dr. A. Cannara
Menlo Pk., Calif.