As Peter Hawkins said:
>
> 1) The UI.
I have a couple UI suggestions as well. I'd like to be able to open
multiple capture files at the same time. Also, when I'm looking at packets,
I sometimes find one that's really interesting. What I'd like to be able to
do is drag the tree-analysis and hexdump of that packet off to the side
into it's own floating window, and continue looking at packets in the main
window(s).
> 2) Additional functionality...
> Add a simple progress bar type network load indicator in the sniffing
> statistics area. So at any given moment I can tell my network is at X%
using threads, right?
> For the TCP stream analysis, do everything as essentially a list,
> listing packet info, direction and contents, etc. so I could view a POP
> connection like this:
Do you mean show have a window like the packet list window, except instead of
showing one packet per line, show one TCP read/write per line? We could
do this for all connection-oriented protocols (e.g., SPX).
> BTW, how does ethereal avoid sniffing it's own DNS packets from reverse
> DNS lookups? I'm interested in how this is done.
it captures and decodes in separate steps, not at the same time.
> 4) An issue kindof seperate from the actual sniffer proper, but I'd like
> context-sensitive help for packet fields. I want to be able to press f1
> while the TCP receive window field is selected and to get a nice verbose
> description on what the TCP receive window is, what it does, why it
> really shouldn't be 0 for a healthy connection, etc. Maybe use the gnome
> help browser for this. Maybe use a little popup window. This would allow
> Joe average to understand a packet field without having to go digging
> through specs and RFCs.
I think this might work very well with Guy's suggestion of making a list of
properties for each packet. Each property type can easily be linked with a
little sentence or paragraph explaining what that property is.
(Peter: Guy Harris has an idea where the packet-*.c files decode the
packets, but then make a list of properties. A separate function translates
the list of properties to the tree widget. Having all the fields in a
property list would help us search and filter on packets).
--gilbert
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