Welcome to my world. I handle this by
creating a custom installer each time a new release of Wireshark comes out. It’s
more work for me, but it’s far more convenient to have one version that incorporates
the latest changes from Wireshark as well as the proprietary customizations
that make the tool even more useful to those who use it at my company. If
you’ve only got a normal dissector, then it’s rather trivial to
support since you only have to copy your dissector to epan/dissectors/ and update the Makefile.common file then recompile
and repackage the installer. To me, that’s far easier/nicer for the
users than having to worry about multiple versions or having to remember to copy
a dll or something.
Note that if you’ve got some plugins, as
I do, and if you need to support multiple platforms – Windows, Linux, …
(as I do), then you’ve got more work to do. The tutorial you
followed appears to be a tutorial on building a plugin dissector, not a normal
dissector, but if possible you should convert your plugin to a normal dissector
to make things a little easier for yourself if you’re going to be
building your own customized installer. Read the doc/README.developer for how to write a normal dissector. Now if you can’t or
don’t want to convert your plugin to a normal dissector, then there are
threads on this developer’s list discussing in detail what you need to do
for a plugin and I’m sure doc/README.plugin has
additional information too, not to mention the tutorial you followed.
Probably not the answer you were looking for,
but that’s what I would suggest …
- Chris
From: wireshark-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:wireshark-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Eytan Kidron
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2007
9:21 AM
To: wireshark-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Wireshark-dev]
Distributing a wireshark dissector
Hi,
I
have a question concerning the creation and distribution of dissectors.
I
created a dissector using a tutorial which I found in http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/custom_dissector.asp,
and now I have a dll called my-protocol.dll.
I
am not interested, at this point, in distributing this dissector to the general
public, but I am interested in distributing it within my organization. I found
that I could do that by creating a wireshark installer (see step 12 in the link
above).
When
others in my organization executed this installer and copied the dll to the
appropriate place, they could use the dissector. The problem with that is that
whenever a new version of wireshark is released, my dissector will obviously
not be there, and if somebody wants some feature from a newer wireshark version
and also wants my dissector, they need two separate wireshark installations.
My
question is:
Is
it possible to add a new dissector to an existing wireshark without having to
reinstall it or install a separate instance of wireshark?
One
might expect that I could simply copy my-protocol.dll to the folder where all
the other dlls are, but when I tried to do this I got an error in loading a C
runtime library (incidentally, I am working on Windows XP). Is that supposed to
work?
I
don't mind the users in my organization having to do something extra (like
copying a dll) every time they update their wireshark, if they want to use this
dissector, but I don’t want to need to create a new installer whenever a
new wireshark version is released.
I
would be grateful if anyone could help me with this.
Thanks,
Eytan
