Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [ethereal-dev] Quick hack to provide details about name lookups

["Brian J. Murrell" <1025c7f65a6f1264affb56ae97d83fc3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

from the quill of Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxxxxx> on scroll
<19991107130217.A4375@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> 
> Yup - COL_INFO should contain more than the minimum amount of
> information about the packet; it should contain a useful one-line
> summary of the packet's contents.

Bingo!  You know what I would love?  Is a "low deskspace overhead mode".
 Basically when selected it goes into a mode which looks like little
more than tcpdump in an xterm, complete with small font selection.  I
keep a tcpdump on my desktop, at the bottom right above my Gnome panel
just to keep an eye on the traffic, notice weird things and be able to
glance at when something on the network is taking a long time.  I would
love to do this with ethereal and a 1MB ring buffer ("wrap to beginning
when full" in "sniffer" parlance) but as it is now, it takes up way too
much desktop realestate in return for too little information.

> There is, but it requires a routine that's in the CVS tree,

I am working off the CVS tree.  :-)

> but that may not be in the 0.7.7 release - "col_append_fstr()", which
> lets you append a formatted string to the COL_INFO column.

Ding ding!  That is exactly what is needed.  I should have thought about
that and went looking for it.

> I've checked in a version of your change that uses
> "col_append_fstr()".

Going to do a cvs update right now (and will have a bag of conflicts to
resolve, but that's the easy part  :-).  Thanks Guy!!

b.


--
Brian J. Murrell                              InterLinx Support Services, Inc.
North Vancouver, B.C.                                             604 983 UNIX
        Platform and Brand Independent UNIX Support - R3.2 - R4 - BSD