erlang packet sniffer scanner

[Javier París Fernández]

El Viernes, 28 de Abril de 2006 18:41, a escribió:
> New
>
> I would like to use erlang in a school assignment  writing a packet
> sniffer I am new to this langauge
> but what  I have read it appears to scale better than java
> threads ... and with the ip support it appears
> to take less code than java.... Any direction or guidance would be
> welcomed

Mmm, writing a packet sniffer has two challenges:

- Capturing all the packets: Ok, you cannot really use only Erlang for this. 
You will have to write a C Port that either uses a raw socket  (this is in 
linux), or for better portability, uses the libpcap library (I don't know if 
your school will consider this cheating). To be fair, I don't think this can 
be done natively in Java either.

- Analyzing the packets you are receiving. For this Erlang bit syntax will
make your life easy. This part will probably be much easier in Erlang than 
in Java.

However, I don't understand why you want a large number of threads for this.
I think that one thread doing the capture work and another one making the
analysis should be enough... (Maybe I'm wrong on this)

Regards.
Javier.