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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Conversations lifetime

From: Evan Huus <eapache@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 15:18:16 -0400
On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 1:57 PM, David Ameiss <netshark@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I could be wrong, but I could swear that, until recently, conversations
> essentially had capture lifetime. So that, from one pass of the capture to
> the next, the conversations (and any proto data stored in them) remained.

That is correct. The conversation data (typically from
find_or_create_conversation) will persist across passes of the
capture. Additional data stored with that conversation via
conversation_add_proto_data will be persisted (or at least, a pointer
to it will be; the data itself should be allocated with
wmem_file_scope in order to persist correctly).

> That does not seem to be the case now. Between one pass of the capture
> (pinfo->fd->flags.visited == 0) and the next (pinfo->fd->flags.visited ==
> 1), the conversation data seems to have been nuked.
>
> Note: this is the git development tree.
>
> Has this changed? Or did I completely misunderstand the scope of
> conversations, and have just been lucky until recently?

Something funny's going on. Either a bug in libwireshark, or you're
accidentally misusing and API, or something. Can you turn this into a
small reproducible case?

Evan