Guy Harris wrote:
On Wednesday, July 2, 2003, at 6:01 PM, Nathan Jennings wrote:
Attached are patch files I've created with "cvs diff" against anon cvs
as of yesterday morning. The patches add an optional interfaces
description string to the capture preferences dialog. The description
string looks like:
eth0(eth0 descr),eth1(eth1 descr),...
So does this add the ability for the *user* to add a description, over
and above whatever description the OS supplies, if any?
Yes, I should have said "user-defined" description string.
If so, then perhaps it should default that description to the one the OS
supplies, and let the user override that, rather than having two
descriptions on OSes where the OS supplies one (currently only Windows,
but at some point libpcap might dig up descriptions on some UNIXes) -
the OS description is often just a model name, and an explicit
user-supplied description might render the OS description unnecessary
(not that a model name is all that useful on a multi-homed machine with
multiple interfaces of the same type anyway).
Yeah, I thought about that too... the OS may provide a description. But,
like you mentioned, sometimes you may have two or more of the same
type/brand of NIC and that's not helpful. At least in my case. I was
looking for something that would identify the "network" that the NIC is
connected to by name. For instance, if I click the dropdown combo, I was
wanting to see:
(web DMZ switch) eth1
(outside Internet hub) eth2
(internal LAN switch) eth3
...
> That might be simpler than having two description strings for
> interfaces.
As far as implementing the above, when I first started I thought this
may become too complicated. It took me awhile to find a clean entry
point. I'd never looked at the code before. :o(
What ended up being great about it was the code to remove the
description from the device name was already there (strrchr()) for
Windows. And, as long as I prepended the description, it was OK as is
without me adding anything additional. I put a comment regarding this in
the code. We could do this for the OS NIC names like you suggested above
too (as a default?).
-Nathan
