Message-Id: <200102081602.LAA05327@picard.cs.ohiou.edu> From: "Shawn Ostermann" <ostermann@cs.ohiou.edu> Subject: Re: A Question of File Input Formats Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2001 11:02:56 -0500
> I am aware that TCPTrace only takes BINARY dump files from TCPDump. However,
> I have a lot of useful ASCII formatted TCPDump files which I wouldn't mind
> analysing with TCPTrace. Thus I was wondering if anyone knows of a simple
> ASCII --> BINARY conversion utility for TCPDump (and yes, I know I could do
> a simple PERL script to do this, but I did not want to duplicate effort in
> case something like this existed already).
>
> Many thanks,
> Milosh
I don't know of such a thing, although I've wanted one on several
occastions. I see a couple of problems:
1) missing information
not all of the information that tcptrace uses in all cases can be
gleaned from just the ASCII output, but I suspect it would suffice
in most cases
2) tedious!
tcpdump output format seems pretty regular. It wouldn't be
extremely difficult to parse the output, but it would take a while
to get all of the special cases right (IP options, TCP options,
etc, etc)
If somebody were tempted to write such a thing, I'd suggest that you
make ASCII Tcpdump a supported input format. You could even write the
parser in lex/yacc which should make the task much easier. It makes
me a little nervous having a program that is pretending to create
tcpdump binary files when those files would necessarily have errors in
them from missing information. If somebody is tempted, please let me
know!
Shawn
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Dr. Shawn Ostermann - Associate Professor - Ohio University
322B Stocker Center, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio 45701-2979
ostermann@cs.ohiou.edu -- FAX: (740)593-0007 -- Voice: (740)593-1234
http://ace.cs.ohiou.edu/~osterman http://irg.cs.ohiou.edu
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