Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] capturing ATM

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2003 11:35:40 -0700
On Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 12:04:15PM +0200, Jordi Molgo wrote:
> I'm interested in capturing data from an ATM network, and
> decode the IP packets which are transported as data by
> the ATM level. The ATM operates using PVCs.
> I have been told that is possible to use optical splitters and a PC with
> 2 ATM NIC. Would this work with ethereal?

Probably not.  Ethereal currently uses the libpcap/WinPcap library to
capture packets, and that library currently only supports capturing on
devices that are plugged into the OS's networking stack (or, on systems
with BPF, plugged into BPF) - if you try to do that sort of passive
snooping on an ATM network, your ATM NIC might not be plugged into the
networking stack in that fashion, so libpcap might not work with it.