On 7/4/05, Mike Kershaw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Ah, in my case, restarting the remote capture units is highly
> undesirable/difficult/annoying to the users.

Ok, but that depends on the application. I think it would be nice to
support easy restarting of remote capture processes, especially if
there are many of them.

> Theres a fair number of cases where people want to use
> that data in other apps, realtime.  Currently Kismet can present a fifo
> named pipe, but that has lots of drawbacks 

Yes, that it pretty much what I do at the moment, and the named pipe
is very ugly. It has two main problems, imho: no concept of a
connection, and no multiplexing for several readers. So using TCP
should be a significant improvement.

> So that explains where I'm coming from with, say, a TCP server on one
> side and libpcap as a TCP network client on the other.  

Fine by me. And libpcap would not send on the TCP connection? So it is
still a lot easier than rpcap.

> I'm almost envisioning a network protocol spec for this and maybe an
> example server, rather than the server code written entirely into
> libpcap. 

If libpcap reads the connection, the format does not actually matter,
because it is not exposed. On the other hand, I don't see much reason
to deviate from the libpcap format.

Do you have a document for the layer 1 encapsulation? I am looking for
an existing dissector in Ethereal that I could use for my purpose
(because I am lazy), but I have not found anything promissing. Linux
cooked looks ok, but I can't get it to recognise MTP3 (SS7) frames.

So to recap the discussion: we have a 3 tier architecture, with a
"capture multiplexer" in the middle. Libpcap can connect to this
multiplexer via TCP. Capture drones can connection to the multiplexer
using TCP (or UDP in my case).

3 parts have to be implemented: libpcap reading from a TCP connection,
the multiplexer and an prototype capture drone.

There are two network protocols to define, although I would propose
libpcap for both of them.

> If libpcap is only the client, and we present a standard
> network protocol for sending data to libpcap, then all the custom apps
> that want to provide hooks can do so easily.

Yes, very nice :-)

Thomas
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