[En-Nut-Discussion] PPP Debugging Software

[Louis Beaudoin]

Yes, I've been meaning to post my directions for some time now.  My method
manually edits the data using notepad, but this could be easily integrated
into software if anyone is inclined to do it.  I don't have the time or
windows coding experience to do it right now.

I use Mike Cornelius' Serial Analyzer software, which prints out incoming
data on two serial ports to a text screen with timestamps and translating
each character to it's hex value.  (you make an adapter to monitor both
lines between the terminal and the modem)  To get this in the format
ethereal needs, I find the start and end of each PPP frame (7E/7E), and
group each frame on a separate line.  The 7E's all need to be removed.  The
start of the line needs to be 000000 to indicate a new packet, and the end
needs to have a space.  Then I use the find/replace function of notepad to
replace all the escape characters and translated characters because ethereal
doesn't recognize them.  (7D 2X -> 0X, 7D 3X -> 1X).

Save this modified text file, and run the program text2pcap with the
following parameters:
text2pcap -l 9 inputfile.txt outputfile.log

It should say packets were sucessfully recognized, and you now have a log
file you can open up in ethereal.  You can enable the 16-bit FCS in ethereal
under edit->preferences->protocols->PPP, and it will compare the FCS at the
end of the packet to what it calculates for the data.

All this sounds quite complicated, but once you've done it a few times it
only takes about a minute to convert a series of packets.

On my website is a sample text file and corresponding log file.
www.embedded-creations.com/ppp.txt
www.embedded-creations.com/ppp.log

Hope this helps someone,
Louis Beaudoin
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