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Wireshark-users: Re: [Wireshark-users] Question about TCP buffering and Wireshark

From: sean bzd <seanbzd@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:39:29 -0400
Thanks so much for that. Will try tcp_dissect_pdus()

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Guy Harris<guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Jul 17, 2009, at 11:59 AM, sean bzd wrote:
>
>> TCP experts,
>> I'm trying to understand some TCP packets sent by my application that
>> I captured through wireshark. I noticed that multiple send() {winsock
>> API) calls are being combined into a single TCP frame.
>
> Yes.  TCP is a byte-stream protocol, with no notion of packet
> boundaries, so the application receiving those packets will need to be
> able to handle getting multiple packets from a single read.
>
>> My custom
>> plugin doesn't seem to be able to parse this properly. Is there a
>> setting in wireshark to show these separately?
>
> No.
>
>> OR is there something
>> in the plugin I can do to separate the frame into multiple app
>> packets??
>
> Possibly.  If your app packets either
>
>        1) have a fixed length
>
> or
>
>        2) have some way where, after reading the first part of the app
> packet, you can determine from that information how long the total
> packet is
>
> (which you might need anyway, in order to allow the application
> receiving the packets to divide the byte stream it gets into app
> packets) you can use tcp_dissect_pdus() in your dissector.
>
>> The otherway around - i.e a large app packet split up into multiple
>> tcp frames is working fine and I had to do something special in my
>> plugin to handle this. (reassembled PDUs).
>
> tcp_dissect_pdus() will also handle that for you.
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