Ethereal-dev: RE: [Ethereal-dev] show hostname in window title - feature/patch submission
In our environment, we currently have 11 different racked servers (we'll
call them Sniffers) spread throughout our network that each have anywhere
from 3 to 9 interfaces that are be watched with Ethereal. In our group of
50+ people, we have had, at times, almost the entire group running captures
total over all the different Sniffers. More often than not, as our group is
troubleshooting a variety of problems that may crop up for our clients, each
person alone can have upwards of 10 different captures running concurrently
on their workstation's desktop. These captures are run via opening up a
remote X-Windows session to the user's desktop using Xmanager. These people
are unaware of the interface name and the machine's hostname. What they are
aware of is the location of the Sniffer, and which node on the network that
interface is watching. For example, the "Wilmington Core Sniffer - Inside
Primary Firewall."
We have built a portal, so to speak, that contains a GUI for all of the
different sniffers and their interfaces (in lamens terms for the users), so
that they can choose which node they need to watch, and the portal will have
the Sniffer spawn a remote X-Windows session back to the user's desktop and
open up Ethereal on the proper interface with the proper filter. The fact
that Ethereal is watching 'eth1' or 'bond3' or whatever means nothing to the
majority of the users in the group. This is why I built in the
functionality to provide custom window titles via the CLI so that the user
would know which node via which sniffer they were looking at. So
"(Wilmington Core Sniffer - Inside Primary Firewall) The Ethereal Network
Analyzer" would appear as the name of Window when Ethereal first appears on
the user's desktop.
Hopefully this can provide more background on why I think it is also
necessary to be able to provide a way for the user to control the window
titles.
-gabriel
