https://bugs.wireshark.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6645
--- Comment #17 from Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 2012-09-26 11:46:59 PDT ---
(In reply to comment #16)
> > Yes. On Windows, return both, if available; on UN*X, return the description,
> > as returned by libpcap, as the friendly name (in those cases where it's
> > returned on UN*X, it'll be a friendly name, rather than a vendor description).
> >
>
> From the looks of things on my linux vm, the description sits half way between
> a vendor description and a friendly name.
> e.g.
> $ dumpcap -D
> 1. eth0
> 2. usbmon1 (USB bus number 1)
> 3. usbmon2 (USB bus number 2)
> 4. any (Pseudo-device that captures on all interfaces)
> 5. lo
For actual hardware interfaces, there *is* no vendor description; those
descriptions are supplied by libpcap.
> The actual name on linux is already very friendly.
>
> I plan on adding code that allows you to specify the interface in dumpcap by
> friendly name when known (possibly even with prefix matching if exact match
> fails), but wasn't thinking to support interface matching by vendor
> description.
>
> I can't really see people specifying an interface by the linux descriptions
> shown above, which puts more weight on a view that libpcap/winpcap description
> consistently = vendor description. I am however unaware of the behaviour on
> other UN*X platforms
$ uname -sr
Darwin 12.2.0
$ dumpcap -D
1. en0
2. p2p0
3. lo0
This is on the BSD-flavored UNIX that ships with a line of computers originally
sold as "the computer for the rest of us", so its user base is probably less
technical, on average, than that for other UN*Xes, although most of them
probably couldn't usefully use Wireshark (just as is the case on Windows).
"en0" is *not* an Ethernet; it's a Wi-Fi interface. I think a perhaps more
friendly name can be dug out of the System Configuration framework, as the
System Preferences Network dialog refers to it as "Wi-Fi" (and also refers to
"Thunderbolt" and "Firewire".
{Free,Net,Open,DragonFly }BSD give hardware-based interfaces names based on the
particular type of interface hardware; FreeBSD and OpenBSD allow a description
to be set by the user.
So I'd vote for continuing to *show* a description to the user on UN*X, at
least. All UN*Xes have interface "device names" that are less ugly than the
GUID-based names that NT 5 introduced (NT 4, at least, had a somewhat
UNIX*-style convention for interface names), so I'd be inclined to show them to
the user as well.
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