Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Ethereal for Visual Basic
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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2001 10:13:31 -0700
On Mon, Oct 08, 2001 at 04:22:43PM +0000, Fiach Reid wrote: > This is my first posting to ethereal, so be nice (please). > What I'm looking to do is to create a simple re-useable component > that I can plug into my existing Visual Basic applications which > will fire events (call backs) whenever a network packet appears on > the phone line. If all you want is an event whenever a network packet appears, you don't necessarily need all of Ethereal; the core part of Ethereal does packet dissection, the same way Network Associates Sniffers, Microsoft Network Monitor, and so on do. The library that Ethereal uses to capture packets is called libpcap on UNIX, and WinPcap on Windows (WinPcap is a port of libpcap to Win32 OSes, plus a driver that adds to various Windows OSes the ability for a user-mode program to capture packets, and a library that provides an interface to those drivers). The WinPcap Web site is at http://netgroup-serv.polito.it/winpcap/ and has a FAQ at http://netgroup-serv.polito.it/winpcap/misc/faq.htm which has an entry that says Q-8: Can I use WinPcap with Visual Basic? A: We don't support Visual Basic and we are not able to provide help on this subject because we don't know enough about this language. BeeSync has developed an ActiveX control that integrates winpcap packet capture functionality with Visual Basic or any other programming environment supporting Microsoft ActiveX technology. You can find it at http://www.beesync.com/products.html. so, with WinPcap and their PacketX control, you could, presumably, write a Visual Basic program that can capture packets from a network interface. Given, however, that you said "phone line", you're presumably capturing on a PPP connection on a modem; if so, then note that *another* entry in the WinPcap FAQ says: Q-4: Can I use WinPcap on a PPP connection? A: We have tested WinPcap on PPP connections under Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME. In Windows 95, due to a bug in NDIS, WinPcap sometimes resets the PPP connection. In Windows 98/ME this bug appears to be corrected, and WinPcap seems to work properly. Under Windows NT and Windows 2000 there are problems with the binding process, that prevents a protocol driver from working properly on the WAN adapter. so capturing on your modem line is likely not to work very well at all on Windows NT or 2000, and it may also have problems on Windows 95. > As I believe, much of ethereal's functionality is encapsulated > in a dll?, *Some* of Ethereal's functionality is encapsulated in various libraries that are DLLs on Windows. Not much of it is, however; the packet capturing functionality is in the WinPcap DLLs, and the ability to read saved capture files is in the Wiretap DLL, which is part of Ethereal - note, however, that we do *NOT* guarantee that the Wiretap DLL's programming or binary interface will not change in future Ethereal releases, and note also that it requires (as does Ethereal) the GLib library. The ability to analyze the contents of packets, however, is *not* encapsulated in a DLL.
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