Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Re: Ethereal Gripe

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From: John McDermott <jjm@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2003 15:31:06 -0600

I know Richard was thinking about this a few years ago (http://www.ethereal.com/lists/ethereal-dev/199907/msg00129.html). What ever happened to the "6000 lines of code", Richard? IIRC you built the SMB stuff with this PDL.

Analyzer (http://analyzer.polito.it/) and Spy have protocol or rather packet description languages. We mentioned spy's (http://pweb.de.uu.net/trillian.of/Spy/documentation/doc4.html#4) in the earlier discussion. Analyzer has a BSD type license and SPY seems to be proprietary. It would be nice to find a GPL packet description language we could incorporate.

--john

Andreas Sikkema wrote:
John McDermott wrote:


This might be tricky with tethereal. It would be nice to have a gui-based protocol analyzer builder, though, even if it were simple. It could generate the "protocol specification language", C or perl/python. I was thinking of a sort of generic, basic (not BASIC) sort of tool so that if someone wanted to one could build a quick and dirty decoder.


I am thinking along the lines of a very simple language (something
like a stripped version of ASN.1).

You have bits, bytes, integers, strings and the sequence in which they
appear are the way the appear in the protocol. Maybe add something
like a choice, but that would make things slightly more complicated,
but not that much I think.

PROTOCOL "MyFirstProtocol", "My very own first protocol"
...




--
John McDermott
Writer, Educator, Consultant
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