Lucent Technologies Ethereal manual Control Protocol dissection, Enabled Protocols dialog box

Models: Ethereal

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Customizing Ethereal

9.4. Control Protocol dissection

The user can control how protocols are dissected.

Each protocol has its own dissector, so dissecting a complete packet will typically involve several dissectors. As Ethereal tries to find the right dissector for each packet (using static "routes" and heuristics "guessing"), it might choose the wrong dissector in your specific case. For example, Eth- ereal won't know if you use a common protocol on an uncommon TCP port, e.g. using HTTP on TCP port 800 instead of the standard port 80.

There are two ways to control the relations between protocol dissectors: disable a protocol dissector completely or temporarily divert the way Ethereal calls the dissectors.

9.4.1. The "Enabled Protocols" dialog box

The Enabled Protocols dialog box lets you enable or disable specific protocols, all protocols are en- abled by default. When a protocol is disabled, Ethereal stops processing a packet whenever that pro- tocol is encountered.

Note!

Disabling a protocol will prevent information about higher-layer protocols from being displayed. For example, suppose you disabled the IP protocol and selected a packet containing Ethernet, IP, TCP, and HTTP information. The Ethernet information would be displayed, but the IP, TCP and HTTP information would not - disabling IP would prevent it and the other protocols from being displayed.

Figure 9.5. The "Enabled Protocols" dialog box

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Lucent Technologies Ethereal manual Control Protocol dissection, Enabled Protocols dialog box