Richard and Guy,
Thanks for all of the suggestions. I have resolved the problem I was
having.
I am working with two different systems, a Win 2000 stand-alone server and
an NT Stand-alone server. (Sorry I forgot that I had wiped out Win 98 and
Installed NT Server on my second system.) I had already discovered that
one of my co-workers machines had the same problem as mine and that the
pathing was different on the error message he had gotten. My coworker
simply created the directory structure his error message was looking for
(\user\ddavis), restarted ethereal and filters started working for him. I
ran set on my friend's computer as Guy had suggested and began comparing
his settings with mine. My settings were all pointing at network
locations that either did not exist or that I would not have write
permissions for anyway. Unfortunately, I could not create the required
directories out on the network server since I do not have sufficient
rights to do so. I tried changing the settings manually per Richard's
suggestions. But, as soon as I closed the Command Prompt window those
settings would return to their original values. Well, later on, I was
playing around in User Manager for Domains and discovered something I had
forgotten. Homepath can be set under User Profiles. I called one of our
network admins and asked them to change this setting for me to the one I
wanted. Since my network admins are not using homepath for anything, they
did not object. They changed me from the connect setting (which points
out to the network) to the local setting which sets c as my homedrive and
allows the admin to specify the homepath setting. As soon as I restarted
my computer, everything worked. My friend David was getting in because he
was logging into his own Local Domain. When I logged into the local
domain on one of my systems Ethereal worked there as well.
It looks as if this problem would have happened to any user who logged
into the main domain, regardless of their version of Windows, since the
default setting for homepath that our network admins use is Connect. I
was lucky and our admins were willing to change this for me since they do
not use this feature. However, not all network admins would be amenable
to making a change like this. My suggestion would be to have a setting
that allows the user to specify the directory you create the .ethereal
folder in so that it can be used if homepath (and/or homedirectory) does
not work for them. I believe this is a relatively common network setting.
If the appdata setting is something that will be used in the future, that
should probably be user specifiable as well.
Can you guys pass these suggestions on to the Ethereal development team?
Thanks again for the assistance.
Jeanne
Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>
11/07/2001 03:30 PM
To: jeanne_gaskill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
cc: ethereal-users@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Ethereal-users] Error when opening Ethereal
> How about on the Win 98 machine?
I don't have a Windows 98 machine at home or at work.
It might work. No guarantees.
> Could you include
> a printout of the contents of the \appdata\ethereal folder.
No, because the contents depend on what's been saved. That folder is a
subdirectory of your profile directory; it's *not* a directory that's
part of the Ethereal installation. Ethereal is supposed to create it if
it needs to save something in it and it doesn't already exist - and it
did so on my NT 4.0 partition at home. Something about W2K is getting
in the way on my work machine, although the code looks as if it should
work correctly.
I.e., it's not "C:\APPDATA\Ethereal", or "C:\Program
Files\Ethereal\APPDATA\Ethereal", it's "C:\Documents and Settings\{your
login name}\Application Data\Ethereal", or something like that.
