Wireshark-users: Re: [Wireshark-users] embed comments and notes into trace?

From: "Donaldson Charles-MGI1064" <charlesdonaldson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:58:22 -0500
Ignore this if you are doing post edits to a capture.

Otherwise, I have used netcat - nc on some systems - during test
automation to insert test sequence delimiters. And then decode the
frames as telnet. So, a server would run 'while [ 1 ]; do netcat -lp
6200; done' and the test script would run 'echo "something is about to
happen" | netcat <server-ip> 6200'. Both netcat sessions - the endless
loop and the delimiter - can be run on the same machine as sniffer -
Wireshark.



 
Regards,
Charles Donaldson
charlesdonaldson@xxxxxxxxxxxx
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Gerald Combs [mailto:gerald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2008 12:03 PM
To: Community support list for Wireshark
Subject: Re: [Wireshark-users] embed comments and notes into trace?

Alan Jay Weiner wrote:
> Does anyone know of a protocol I can use in this way?  It seems to me 
> I remember something like this, but I'll be darned if I can find it 
> now.  I can mis-use something - send a DNS query to "starting doing 
> something-or-other" but the info line will have other cruft on it 
> ("standard query A starting doing something-or-other").

Instead of using a dummy protocol, you might want to use a file format
that lets you add comments directly to packets, such as pcap-ng:

http://www.winpcap.org/ntar/draft/PCAP-DumpFileFormat.html
http://wiki.wireshark.org/Development/PcapNg

Experimental support is currently in Wireshark, in wiretap/pcapng.[ch].