I've been thinking more on what etherape really is, and definitely it
shouldn't need
to deal with packet capture. It should accecpt a stream of information
from which
it could select what defines a node, and what a link, and simply draw
the diagram.
We have agreed on ethereal being the one capturing and dissecting the
traffic.
I don´t know much about XML, though, and I was wondering whether XML
would be appropriate as a streem that could be picked up on the fly,
rather
than having etherape calling and setting up a copy of ethereal to
provide it
with info. If we had ethereal running with a FIFO, by the way, the
problem of
user permissions would be gone.
Now, I realize that this developments will not happen overnight, and
I'm going to further develop etherape using pcap in the meantime.
I'm thinking of a structure like this:
guint8 *l2_addr; /* normally ethernet addresses */
guint8 *l3_addr; /* normally ip addresses */
guint8 *l4_addr; /* normally tcp or udp ports */
...
And then any combination of this addresses would be the key
to define a node.
So I'd write code that would fill up the addresses according to
the protocols being used, and doing name resolving as well.
So one more question. Is this scheme inappropriate to any
particular case?
Please, comment.
Regards,
Juan.
