Wireshark-users: Re: [Wireshark-users] Support for WAN / HDLC

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2006 15:23:12 -0800

On Dec 15, 2006, at 8:09 AM, Hubert.Miecznikowski@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Can WireShark be used for analyzing X.25, FrameRelay .... and other WAN
protocols?

Yes.

It include dissectors for LAPB and X.25 PLP, and for the low-level Frame Relay protocol, and you can add more dissectors. (If you add them, you have to make the source code to the dissectors available to anybody who gets a copy of those dissectors, and must allow them to give the source code away to anybody they want to, without restrictions. Probably the best thing to do is to contribute the dissectors to the Wireshark code base, which means we can update them if any dissector programming interfaces change.)

The only tricky part would be if you used Wireshark to do the capturing. Whether it can capture traffic on a particular network type depends on whether the libpcap/WinPcap library can capture on that network type, and that, in turn, depends on the platform on which you're running, and the drivers for the network adapters.

If you don't use Wireshark, you would have to write the captured data to a file in a format that Wireshark can read; you can add new file formats to Wireshark if necessary (the same rules about the source code apply).

You'll probably have further questions in response to my message; if they involve making modifications to Wireshark, you might want to ask them on the wireshark-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx list.