On Oct 13,  8:44pm, Robert Elz wrote:
} Subject: Re: ascii dump for tcpdump (was Re: truss-like command for netbsd

} On the subject, I'm not sure that ascii conversion of tcpdump output is
} worth the code it would consume - even the hex output is really useful only
} when you're faced with protocols that tcpdump doesn't understand, and you
} want to figure out what's going on the hard way (usually it is easier to
} add the relevant decode to tcpdump, which is why the dhcp mods got made...)

ASCII mode would be awfully handy for debugging SMTP and NNTP problems.
It's not much fun to try to do this in hex.

What would you do to teach tcpdump about SMTP?  If it sees HELO in the
data stream, tcpdump would print HELO?