On Thu, Dec 14, 2000 at 07:03:58PM -0000, Andy Leigh wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I wonder if anyone has some advice. I and my colleagues run Ethereal on a
> number of different Windows 9x platforms with the GTK libraries (downloaded
> from the Ethereal site). Ethereal only stays around for a couple of captures
> before dying. There is no consistent behaviour on when it fails: sometimes
> paging down a decode; sometimes just clicking on a line of decode; sometimes
> resizing a window; sometimes just as it's about display the decode
> information. The consistent theme is that it stays around for only a few
> minutes before requiring a restart. The symptoms are either: a) an error
> message pops up about the application behaving illegally or b) a dos-box
> appears referring to font problems (the latter happening far-less frequently
> than the former). The behaviour has been consistent for all versions of
> Ethereal and GTK.
>
> It strikes me that this is a GTK library problem. To avoid clashes I never
> install the dlls into windows/system, but keep them in the same directory as
> the current version of Ethereal.
It might not be. There could be a bug in one of our protocol dissectors
that gets triggered by a certain type of packet that happens to be
common on your network. The next time Ethereal crashes, try to find
the temporary packet trace file (which will probably exist in the
directory that your TEMP env. variable points to). Re-load it and
see if the crash occurs. You can more readly cause a crash by setting
either a color filter or a display filter, which will cause Ethereal
to run a full dissection on each packet, hopefully triggering the
bug. W/o a filter, Ethereal runs a full dissection on a packet only
when you highlight the packet.
If you get a file which always produces an Ethereal crash, please
forward it to ethereal-dev or to me, if you can share the data that's
in the file.
--gilbert
