[pcap-ng-format] IDB: "description" vs. "friendly name"

[Hadriel Kaplan]

Makes sense - I suggest we use something like "if_descriptive_name"
for the "friendly name" option, instead of "if_friendly_name".
-hadriel

On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 5:41 PM, Guy Harris <guy at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> At least in newer versions of Windows, there are two names for a network interface:
>
>         the "friendly name", which is the name typically shown to the user, such as "Local Area Network Connection";
>
>         the "description", which, for hardware adapters, is a description of the hardware.
>
> The second of those names isn't necessarily unique to an adapter - if you have two interfaces of the same hardware type, they'll have the same "description".  They will, however, probably have different "friendly names".
>
> WinPcap currently supplies only the "description".
>
> On the UN*Xes for which libpcap currently provides an interface "description", it's more like a "friendly name".  OS X also lets you get something that's more like a "friendly name", but libpcap doesn't support that.
>
> Wireshark fetches the "friendly name" on both Windows versions on which it's supported and on OS X.
>
> The examples in the pcapng spec show both types of name:
>
>         Examples: "Broadcom NetXtreme", "First Ethernet Interface".
>
> where the first is a "description" and the second is a "friendly name".
>
> We should probably have separate options for them, so both can be recorded.  Note that if only a "description" is present, you don't know whether it's a friendly name or a description of the device.
> _______________________________________________
> pcap-ng-format mailing list
> pcap-ng-format at winpcap.org
> https://www.winpcap.org/mailman/listinfo/pcap-ng-format