Re: Interface names on Windows

[Guy Harris <guy () alum mit edu>]

On Oct 28, 2012, at 4:08 PM, Jakub Zawadzki <darkjames-ws () darkjames pl> wrote:

> if user description:
>  - not set than: format("%s (%s)", friendly_name, interface_description)
>  - set: only user descr.
>
> Anyway such code should imho go to winpcap.

Which code?  The code to get the friendly name, or that code and the code to get the user description, or that plus the 
code that chooses the format in which to display that information?

Currently, the pcap API has no notion of separate "friendly name" and "vendor description" for an adapter; arguably, it 
should.  pcap_findalldevs() would need a data structure change to support that; personally, I'd prefer adding a new API 
that supplies pcap-NG Interface Description Block-style information, as

        1) that makes it easier to map to an IDB

and

        2) that makes it extensible.

Libpcap/WinPcap also has no configuration files it reads or writes, so it has no place to store user descriptions.  I'm 
less sure it should have that.

I'd prefer leaving "how to display it" up to the application (tcpdump, *shark, etc.).

And, yes, ultimately libpcap/WinPcap should supply a friendly name if available and a vendor description if available; 
however, libpcap major releases don't come out very often (once a year or so), and WinPcap is even slower (the latest 
release is over two years old, and is based on libpcap 1.1.0, not on the latest 1.3.0 release, which means it can't 
even read pcap-ng files), so, just as Wireshark does its own enumeration of network interfaces if libpcap is so old 
that it lacks pcap_findalldevs(), it can do its own friendly-name fetching if libpcap/WinPcap doesn't yet have a call 
that supplies the friendly name.
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