[sane-devel] Qyestion about usb packet logging

[kilgota at banach.math.auburn.edu]

I have had some problems recently with usbsnoop (sniff-bin-1.8) which I wonder 
if anyone else has encountered and, if so, whether any workarounds are known:

1. Contents of the window wherein the hardware is listed and one can choose to 
install or uninstall are jumping or flickering approximately once per second.

2. When one tries to install a particular device, the highlighting jumps away 
from the device one has chosen, as soon as the window flickers.

Problems 1 and 2 together are making my installation of usbsnoop to be totally 
unusable. I spent several hours yesterday trying to get something out of it, 
and did not succeed.

Compounding these problems and perhaps related to them is

3. There does not seem to be any obvious way to remove stale entries from the 
usbsnoop choice window. Rather, it seems to contain every device which has ever 
been hooked up to the machine at any time in the past, and some of the devices 
indeed are listed several times, with apparently duplicate entries.

Reinstallation of usbsnoop does not seem to help with any of these problems. I 
have tried that, with no noticeable result. In particular, the relevant 
information for all of those old, stale entries and duplicate entries is 
obviously kept somewhere. Perhaps it would help to delete all that old cruft. 
But where is it kept?

The problems described are, unfortunately, in effect on both of the machines 
which I use for testing things. One of them is an old machine running Win98, 
and the other one is a slightly newer one running Win2K. Both of the machines 
otherwise seem to be in perfect working order and run Linux just fine. 
Therefore, I do not suspect any hardware problems on either of the machines.

I wonder if anyone has ever encountered a similar problem, and, if so, whether 
anyone has ever figured out a way to overcome the problem. Yesterday, I did 
download a copy of the source code for sniff-bin-1.8 as well as the binary. 
Perhaps I could find some clue in that if I knew where to look.

I would like very much to learn any suggestions about how to deal with these 
problems.

Theodore Kilgore