tcpdump mailing list archives

Re: Printing PPI packets


From: Darren Reed <darren.reed () oracle com>
Date: Thu, 05 May 2011 17:20:14 -0700

On  5/05/11 05:09 PM, Guy Harris wrote:
On May 5, 2011, at 4:54 PM, Guy Harris wrote:

On May 5, 2011, at 2:45 PM, Darren Reed wrote:

Looking through it, the first observation I'd make is that there should not have been any 16 bit fields. The one that 
concerns me most is the IDB which has a 16bit link type.
We could add an "enhanced IDB" with a 32-bit LinkType field.
...and the only remaining 16-bit fields are:

        the major and minor version numbers in the Section Header Block - yeah, I know, 640K and all that, but I doubt 
that'll be an issue, especially for the major version number (if you completely incompatibly change the file format more 
than 65535 times in the next 1000 years, UR DOING IT WRONG, and even for the minor version number, given the extensibility of the 
format, I don't see much need for version number changes);

        the Interface ID and Drops Count in the Packet Block, but that's been deprecated in favor of the Extended 
Packet Block, with a 32-bit interface ID and a 64-bit drop count as an option;

        the Record Type and Record Length in the Name Resolution Block - I'm not sure there will be more than 65533 
more name types, so the Record Type is probably OK at 16 bits, but I guess you could either have really really long network 
addresses or, more likely, a huge number of names corresponding to an address, so the 16-bit Record Length might be an 
issue, so there might have to be an Extended Name Resolution Block.

I looked over the other 16 bit fields and came to the same conclusion as yourself about the above so didn't mention them.

In the breakup where you were suggesting 10 bits that could be an organization ID, reserve "0" for the publicly recognised set and all 1's for private/experimental. Is 10 bits enough for an organisation ID? How many organisations have received a number for use with SNMP? I'm not saying that as many organisations will need an identifier here but rather that the number of organisations might be larger than you would suspect at first.

Darren

-
This is the tcpdump-workers list.
Visit https://cod.sandelman.ca/ to unsubscribe.


Current thread: