Re: [Ethereal-users] How does Ethereal interact with Fedora Core?

Michael Cobb wrote:
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> Can anyone explain to me how Ethereal relates to Fedora?

The same way Wireshark relates to it (see the above note).  This 
discussion should probably be continued on the wireshark-users mailing 
list; I'm sending this to that list as well.

> At what OS 
> level is displaying a capture from? I’m not a developer, but need to be 
> certain that packets displayed by Ethereal are indeed being presented 
> from the OS to an application that is running.

Wireshark (and Ethereal) capture traffic using the libpcap library; on 
Linux, that works by opening a "PF_PACKET socket", from which it 
receives the packets.

Packets delivered to a PF_PACKET socket aren't necessarily delivered to 
some other socket; they might be delivered to a networking protocol such 
as TCP or UDP, but that won't necessarily deliver them to a socket.

> I am currently sniffing and seeing the packets in Ethereal. However the 
> developer of the application has inserted debugging code to display when 
> it receives those packets, but it does not acknowledge receiving them. I 
> need to determine if this means the problem is OS related or application 
> related.

It's *probably* application-related.  Are the packets TCP, UDP, or some 
other protocol?  Does the application have a socket open to receive 
those packets?