On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 20:07 -0700, Guy Harris wrote: > On Jul 30, 2008, at 2:12 PM, Stephen Donnelly wrote: > > > I recently came across some packets which tcpdump appears to display > > incorrectly. > > > > Is tcpdump incorrectly invoking some heuristic dissector, or is there > > another reason? > > I guess that's what I'd call it. > > tcpdump assumes that packets to or from certain ports might be KIP- > encapsulated AppleTalk packets (KIP = "Kinetics IP"); see the tcpdump > man page (look for "KIP AppleTalk (DDP in UDP)"), or RFC 1243: > > 4.7. The Kinetics Internet Protocol Group > > The Kinetics Internet Protocol (KIP) is a protocol for encapsulating > and routing AppleTalk datagrams over an IP internet. This name is > historical. The KIP group manages the KIP routing protocol as well > as the routing tables generated by this protocol. > > It uses a heuristic to check, but the heuristic is really weak (it > checks whether, if the payload were an AppleTalk LLAP packet, the type > would be DDP, so it checks one count 'em one byte in the entire > payload).
Okay, the explanation makes sense. We just had bad luck with our packets looking like candidates for KIP. Tcpdump doesn't have a way of configuring/disabling heuristic dissectors like this, without hacking the code? Stephen. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen Donnelly BCMS PhD email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Endace Technology Ltd phone: +64 7 839 0540 Hamilton, New Zealand cell: +64 21 1104378 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- - This is the tcpdump-workers list. Visit https://cod.sandelman.ca/ to unsubscribe.