Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] tapping usability

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

Date Index Thread Index Other Months All Mailing Lists
Date Prev Date Next Thread Prev Thread Next
From: "Guy Harris" <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 18:03:06 -0700 (PDT)
bujecas@xxxxxx said:
> I'm a little bit confused about tapping development ...
> For what purpose tapping was designed?

Allowing pieces of Ethereal other than packet dissectors to get called,
after a packet is dissected, with information about that packet or about
particular protocol layers in that packet.

That's a bit of a vague description - but that's because there wasn't a
single narrow purpose for which the tap mechanism was designed; it was
*intended* to be general.

For example, with the taps that currently come with Ethereal, we have:

    taps that give statistics for particular protocols;

    taps that give general traffic statistics;

    taps that get information about RTP sessions, including the payload in
the session.