Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] resolving of well-known mac-addresses

[Hannes Gredler <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Aug 29, 2002 at 11:36:01AM -0700, Guy Harris wrote:
| On Wed, Aug 28, 2002 at 12:46:41PM +0200, Hannes Gredler wrote:
| > what i am saying does not contradict do what you are saying :-);
| >   i like the fallback idea ....
| 
| It's *not* a fallback!   It's intended to be *the* way to register
| well-known MAC addresses.
| 
| > non-programmers can do it that way ... no problem with that, however if
| > a programmer wants to register his MAC addresses in the code we should permit
| > that freedom of choice
| 
| But why would they want to do so, given that it's easier to do so by
| tweaking a file?

i scanned the cvs repository and did not find a ethers file that comes
  with the standard distribution;
  - so the file is not there yet;
  - who takes care to set it up / bundle it with the distribution ?

secondly it would be possibly for a dissector to compute names;
  - a good example of this is the cisco HSRP / VRRP protocol:
    the MAC addresses [i'll stick with the HSRP example] follows the
    convention 00:00:0c:07:ac:<group> so the dissector could
    register the name All-HSRP-group-xx-routers for all
    256 MAC addresses much more simpler than writing 256 lines
    in a file;  

  all i am asking is freedom of choice .... and i really can't understand
  why this is bad ?

[ ... ]

/hannes