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patch: Allow various ethernet address notations


From: Arien Vijn <arien.vijn () ams-ix net>
Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2008 15:13:32 +0100

Greetings,

Attached is a small patch which makes libpcap filter expressions a bit more tolerant towards ethernet (MAC) address notations.

When troubleshooting network problems, me and my colleagues often want to cut-and-paste MAC addresses as displayed by network equipment. However, modern equipment show addresses in notations that are not accepted in libpcap filter expressions. Changing the notation each time is trivial but annoying. It seems unlikely that we are the only ones doing this. Therefore we would like to propose this patch.

With this patch the following notation forms are accepted as valid addresses:

        \1 xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
        \2 xxxx.xxxx.xxxx
        \3 xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx
        \4 xx.xx.xx.xx.xx.xx
        \5 xxxxxxxxxxxx

\1 is the common notation; \2 is the Cisco-like notation, as used by many equipment vendors; \3 seems preferred by the IEEE and in many books. While testing this patch, I discovered that Debian applies a similar, independently developed, patch just to allow notations \4 and \5.

Please review this patch and consider it for some future release. If needed, I can make a patch for CVS HEAD. The same diff was uploaded to sourceforge.

Kind regards, Arien





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