On Tue, Oct 01, 2002 at 03:20:30PM -0400, John J Pye wrote:
> I will soon be getting a Gigabit Ethernet NIC, and I have two questions
> about Ethereal:
> 1. Does Ethereal handle Jumbo Frames?
> ( I assume it does, but I have never seen it explicitly stated. )
Ethereal doesn't reject as bogus Ethernet frames bigger than 1514 bytes,
so it shouldn't care about jumbo frames - as long as they're "Ethernet
II" frames, with a type field, and not "802.3" frames, with a length
field. (I don't know whether it's even *possible* to have "802.3" jumbo
frames, given that the way to distinguish between "Ethernet II" and
"802.3" is to look at the value of the type/length field and, if it's
bigger than the largest *normal* Ethernet frame size, treat it as a type
field and thus treat the frame as an "Ethernet II" frame.)
> 2. If the new NIC uses NDIS 4.0 or 5.0, is Ethereal compatible with it?
Ethereal does not directly interact, at all, with the network device on
which you're capturing; it knows nothing whatsoever about NDIS, and
doesn't care which NDIS version the driver for a network interface uses.
Ethereal reliease on libpcap/WinPcap to do packet capturing, so it's not
a question of whether the NIC is compatible with Ethereal, it's a
question of whether it's compatible with WinPcap; you'd have to ask the
WinPcap developers whether it could, on W98, handle NDIS 4.0 or 5.0
networking card drivers.
