On Jan 6, 2012, at 8:16 AM, Jakub Zawadzki wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 06, 2012 at 04:47:09PM +0100, Akos Vandra wrote:
>> Another reason why this is not a good approach: Let's get wireshark in
>> the picture. Let's say the user selected a canusb device. The only way
>> for wireshark to know what parameters (ex. baudrate) the canusb device
>> needs is if wireshark knows how the canusb device works. This is bad.
>> IMHO one of the main goals of libpcap would be to hide how the capture
>> device actually works from the user application, so that it can use a
>> device-independent way of getting packets.
>
> IMHO user need to know what parameters he can (or need to) set, and
> 1/ He can use either enviroment variables,
> like:
> CANUSB_BAUDRATE=2400 tcpdump -i canusb0
> USBRADIO0_CHANNEL=12 tcpdump -i usbradio0
>
> 2/ Capture from interfaces like:
> tcpdump -i canusb0:baudrate=2400,parity
> or
> tcpdump -i usbradio0:channel=12
>
> I used something like (2/) in nflog cause there was no other way,
>
> but I agree possibility to add custom parameters would be great, and much
> more user friendly!
Well, maybe. From a command-line user's perspective, it's the difference
between
CANUSB_BAUDRATE=2400 tcpdump -i canusb0
and
tcpdump -i canusb0:baudrate=2400
and
tcpdump -i canusb0 -o baudrate=2400
and
tcpdump -i canusb0 --baudrate 2400
and so on. You have a bunch of parameters that have "short names" to use on
the command line, types, and values.
>From a GUI perspective, perhaps. You'd have a dialog box that has, for
>example, a list of
name: [value widget]
where the value widget might be a spinbox for numerical parameters, a combo
box/option menu/whatever for enumerated-data-type parameters, a checkbox for
Boolean parameters, and a text entry box for text parameters. Either "name"
would be the same as the command-line short name, or it'd be some "descriptive
name" - perhaps there'd be a tooltip with a descriptive phrase. That gets more
complicated if your GUI app is internationalized; Wireshark isn't, and at least
one developer whose mother tongue isn't English has argued against it:
http://wiki.wireshark.org/Development/Translations
but I don't know whether everyone would agree with that, and there are other
pcap-based network analyzers:
http://ksniffer.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/packetyzer/
so I don't want to assume it's tcpdump and Wireshark and nothing else.-
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