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From: cyrus@hi.UUCP (Tait Cyrus)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans
Subject: Re: ethernet analyzer
Message-ID: <13884@hi.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 21-Aug-87 15:33:47 EDT
Article-I.D.: hi.13884
Posted: Fri Aug 21 15:33:47 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 25-Aug-87 07:21:10 EDT
References: <1333@utx1.UUCP>
Reply-To: cyrus@hc.dspo.gov (Tait Cyrus)
Organization: U. of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Lines: 56


   This subject has come up again and I will say what I did the
last time, for the benefit of those who did not see it then.

   Here at the University of New Mexico a research project requires
some hardware that has ethernet abilities.  We needed to be able
to talk tcp/ip.  Instead of starting from scratch, we took the
PD tiny tcp/ip source and started to port it to our board.  The first
problem was that the tiny tcp/ip was written for a 680XX and our
hardware using the NS320XX.  Needless to say, we had byte ordering
problems.  At that time we were not versed in tcp/ip and did not
know where our problem(s) were.  We needed some way to statically
look at the packets our board was sending to see where we were
screwing things up.
   We did this by building, on top of SUN's NIT protocol, a program
that dumped all packets from our board into files.  As a result
of this, we were able to fully debug our software on our board.
Currently, this SUN program is very specific to what we wanted, but
we realize that other people, including ourselves, could benefit
from such an ethernet program.
   Several people have been using the 'tcpdump' program which is
available via anonymous ftp from some machine I remember the name
of.  This program is very nice and too have used it.  The problem
with it is that it is SUN source derived which means that its source
can not be posted.  Our program, on the other hand, is not SUN source
derived.
   The last time I posted to the net about our program, several people
expressed an interest in it.  We are currently enhancing this package
to be more versatile and will allow the user to specify a trigger condition
as well as a packet acceptance condition.  In other words, once the 
trigger condition has been seen, all packets matching the acceptance
condition are either display on the screen, saved into a file, or both.
   Because this endeavor is not one of our regular projects and has
low priority, we will not be posting anything for a about a month.
Since there is no way to make something that will satisfy everyones
needs, we are hoping to have something that will make it easy for
additions/changes to be made.  Eventhough this package only runs on
SUN's, we are trying to make this package generic enough that it
will be able to run under ANY hardware and ANY C compiler.  The reason
I mention C compiler is because the compiler we have for the NS320XX,
quad aligns structures for efficiency which means that network 
structures don't work.

   I would appreciate any suggestions/thoughts that you might have
on such a program.

-- 
    @__________@    W. Tait Cyrus   (505) 277-0806
   /|         /|    University of New Mexico
  / |        / |    Dept of EECE - Hypercube Project
 @__|_______@  |    Albuquerque, New Mexico 87131
 |  |       |  |
 |  |  hc   |  |    e-mail:
 |  @.......|..@       cyrus@hc.dspo.gov or
 | /        | /        seismo!unmvax!hi!cyrus
 @/_________@/