[ethereal-dev] RMON support?

[Martin Atkins <martin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone!
	Appolgies if this is a subject that has been discussed to death
before, but I've only just joined the list.... (and I hope this is the right
place to start this discussion)

	Seeing the announcement of the new release of ethereal yesterday
reminded me of an idea I had some months ago, but havn't been able to follow up.

The idea was to add support in libpcap to capture packets from an RMON probe.
This would, I believe, add significantly to the capabilities of libpcap, since it would
enable one to capture packets *at the right place in the network* without having
to plug the monitoring maching into that place (RMON now being supported by
most managed network devices).

This shouldn't be too hard using (say) the ucd SNMP libraries, and would benefit
all the many programs which use libpcap, although I guess that it would be almost
as good to add the RMON stuff directly to ethereal :-)! Mapping the libpcap filtering
language to the RMON filters might be somewhat more difficult, but this might be
put off until version 2(tm) (? :-).

Is there any good reason why none of the packet capture programs (AFAIK) talk to 
the RMON packet capture functions? Perhaps the RMON stuff is only "well-known" 
to SNMP gurus, and not more widely? Although I would have thought that most
network admins would be interested in both SNMP and packet capture.

Martin
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Martin C. Atkins		martin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Network Administrator	Dept of Computer science, University of York, UK