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

Jasper Bongertz jasper at packet-foo.com
Wed Sep 2 06:26:12 UTC 2015


Yeah, that's something I stumbled across a while ago, too. Two options
are a good idea. We need to add an example to the spec to show what we
mean by either one. I can't really decide between "if_friendly_name"
and "if_descriptive_name", but I'd probably vote for
"if_descriptive_name".

Cheers,
Jasper

on Mittwoch, 2. September 2015 at 03:34 you wrote:

> 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.
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