Wireshark · Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Problems running Ethereal with PPP protocol.

[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, May 13, 2004 at 09:28:51AM +0000, toufik akhdari wrote (in HTML,
which not everybody's mail reader can read conveniently; please send
mail as text rather than HTML if possible):
> I'm using Ethereal0.10.3 do capture pakects from a PC connected to a
> GPRS phone, unfortunately when I run Ethereal I got a message that it's
> not supporting the PPP (point to point protocol), whereas I can see it
> in the Enabled protocols under Analyse in the main menue,

If Ethereal can dissect a particular protocol, as it can with PPP, that
doesn't mean that the OS on which Ethereal is running, and the capture
mechanism Ethereal uses, can capture on network interfaces using that
protocol as their link-layer protocol; the pieces of code involved in
dissecting a protocol and in capturing on a network interface are
completely different.

WinPcap, which is the packet capture mechanism used by Ethereal on
Windows, can't capture on PPP interfaces on Windows NT/2000/XP unless
you're using the WinPcap 3.1 beta version of WinPcap.  Note that it's a
beta release - problems with WinPcap should be reported to the WinPcap
developers, and that's especially true of beta releases, so they will be
able to try to fix the bug before they release the final version.