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Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Serial infrared (SIR) [PATCH]

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 03:11:40 -0700
On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 12:03:59AM -0700, Shaun Jackman wrote:
> What follows is a patch to add serial infrared (SIR) decoding to 
> Ethereal. It is used, for example, by two instances of Palm OS 
> Emulator (Pose) to communicate using IrDA.

Should that be put in its own plugin dissector, or should it be added to
the "plugins/irda" directory?  (It looks as if IrDA runs atop it, rather
than it running atop lower-level IrDA protocols.)

> Now a couple of notes. I believe the checksum is the same as that in 
> PPP. This common code could be factored out.

If so, it should probably go into a "crc16.c" file, with a "crc16.h"
header, and called both by the PPP dissector and the SIR dissector;
"crc16.c" would be added to the DISSECTOR_SUPPORT_SRC macro in
"epan/Makefile.common".

> I've tested this as a plugin.

It would have to be added to the "plugin API" stuff to work on Windows
(at least until we make the plugins link against a libethereal.lib - or
whatever it is you do on Windows).

> Finally, it has one known bug. The protocol uses an escape sequence 
> to escape control characters. These escape sequences should be dealt 
> with before the buffer is passed to the next dissector (IrLAP). I 
> wasn't sure of the best way to handle this.

The right way to handle that is probably to construct a buffer
containing an un-escaped packet, and then construct a new tvbuff out of
that buffer - see, for example, "packet-icq.c", in
"dissect_icqv5Client()" as an example of how to do that.

> +// prototypes

Not all compilers used to compile Ethereal accept C++-style comments. 
To quote the "Portability" section of "doc/README.developer":

	Don't use C++-style comments (comments beginning with "//" and running
	to the end of the line); Ethereal's dissectors are written in C, and
	thus run through C rather than C++ compilers, and not all C compilers
	support C++-style comments (GCC does, but IBM's C compiler for AIX, for
	example, doesn't do so by default).

> +#include <stdint.h>

	% more /usr/include/stdint.h
	/usr/include/stdint.h: No such file or directory
	% uname -sr
	FreeBSD 3.4-RELEASE

	%more /usr/include/stdint.h
	/usr/include/stdint.h: No such file or directory
	%uname -sr
	FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE

<stdint.h> isn't in C89 (or, at least, not in my copy of the 1989 ANSI C
spec), and we don't require C99.  Use GLib's types, such as "gint8",
"guint8", "gint16", "guint16", etc. instead.