I use a custom lex/yacc parser for the tethereal output, yank out what
want, and insert it into postgresql.
Then I pull the data and use graphviz to plot out all the relationships
in SVG format. With this you can zoom, pan, and even bookmark individual
nodes. That and a little javascript and you can do popups(tooltips) and
other things. As an example http://www.linux.org.uk/~ober/test.html
I like to track activity of things like viruses this way.
You will need the SVG plugin for browser.
Hope this helps.
On Tue, 19 Oct 2004, Koen Smets wrote:
> Dear developers,
>
> Together with a fellow student (at the University of Antwerp
> (Belgium), we're working on a year programming assignment. The goal is
> to write visualization tool for an mobility testbed.
>
> I'll give you all a bit of introductory information:
> - as capturing device, we decided to use ethereal (because of the nice
> GUI and filter capabilities) so that we don't have to reinvent the
> wheel.
> - visualization tools:
> * gnuplot (to draw packet/time plots);
> * nam (from the nsnam project -> visualize traffic in real-time animations);
> * self written tool to draw sequence diagrams (visualise traffic from
> one node to others nodes in the topology, in function of time)
> *...
>
> Our task is now to glue all those components together.
>
> What we'd like to do, is write some sort of plugin to Ethereal that
> acts as a client, which main task is to deliver a server the necessary
> data we need to complete the rest of the visualisation (e.g. from the
> packet-list: #,time, source and destination).
>
> The main application will get written in C++ using the Qt GUI. We're
> also the abilities build in Qt (QSocketdevice, QSocketnotifier...) to
> handle client/server interface.
>
> After reading some docs about developing plugins and tapping systems,
> we noticed that most of the information is concerning about new
> protocol dissectors (that's not what we're looking for, isn't?) and so
> we didn't found an answer to our main problem: getting data from
> ethereal in a proper manner.
>
> If this wasn't already hard enough, we also need a way to handle
> events like clicking on a packet in sequence diagram -> highlight
> packet details in ethereal...
> (we thought to write some kind of protocol and also use sockets to get
> that job done , but therefore I think we need to bind some callbacks
> from Ethereal)
>
> Is it possible to you give us some advice, how to handle this 2
> problems? Best way to implement it (using plugins and making use of
> tapping?)
>
>
> Regards,
> Koen Smets
>
>
