Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [ethereal-dev] Ascend router capture

[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Can somebody send me an Ascend router capture file. Currently I don't
> think it works if it is compressed,

It certainly doesn't on my FreeBSD machine, as the "fstat()" in
"ascend_open" in "wiretap/ascend.c" doesn't even compile if HAVE_LIBZ is
defined - you can't do a "fileno()" on a "void *" - so with HAVE_LIBZ
defined, the Ascend code, and thus Wiretap, and thus Ethereal, didn't
even build.  (I wouldn't expect it to build anywhere; did it build
somehow?)

Now, that "fileno()" is done so that the file's inode change time can be
found, which is a hack to work around the fact that not all Ascend
capture files appear to have time stamps any better than "it's been this
long since I was booted"; *if* there were some way of getting absolute
time and date stamps out of "wandsession" files, that wouldn't be
necessary - other capture files, such as one a friend took on his
Pipeline, have date/time stamps in them, although either the clock in
his Pipeline wasn't working or he wasn't keeping it set, as it thinks
the capture was taken in 1991, when it was done this year.