This is a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) file for DaCoPAn2 Animator. It is aimed to help user to find answers for his or hers questions.
You need to load something first. A good choice is loading a pre-designed scenario file (xxx.sce). If none are available, you can also load a protocol events file (yyy.pef), which contains raw protocol data from a recorded protocol exchange.
After you have loaded the file, you can press play to see something. You will be looking at the lowest layer of the exchange, and the progress line will begin to move downward and show lines in the message sequence chart as the protocol events occur. If you want to, you can change to TSC view to see data with another animation type. For TSC view, see also this question.
Press the load button in the upper left corner of the window, marked with an icon of a folder. After this you need to select whether you want to load a scenario file or a PEF file. The default is to show both of types. In some cases there might not be any scenario or PEF files available at your default directory and in this case you will not see anything in the file dialog by default. In this case you can browse your file structure to find some scenario or PEF files.
Also see the manual section on loading and saving files.
Because they are not relevant or possible actions in the situation you are currently in. Examples of this would be that "play" is not a relevant action if there is no file loaded. Another example would be that it's not possible to press play if you are already playing.
It's not too difficult, but takes a bit of effort. For this you will need 3 things: a) a network with at least 2 machines (a real network works as well as a simulated, if you know how to simulate a network properly) b) the ability to run tcpdump on these 2 machines simultaneously. c) the DaCoPAn analyzer program running on a Linux machine to analyze the dumps into a pef file. There is more on this in the specific help of the analyzer. There you can read about the particular tips and tricks you might need to get what you want into the pef.
By dragging the note panel divider bar downwards until the variable area is tall enough to show all the variables you need to see.
Unfortunately it's not possible at this time. The vertical space available it divided evenly among the relevant layers, and it's not possible to resize the layers. A good option is to view the unit that you want to see in the Unit Flow animation, and see all the variables there.
In some cases the note panel will take up the whole vertical space on the right side of the screen by default. You can freely resize the note panel by dragging the divider.
Yes, use nonlinear time axis. In this way you can separate all packets from each other.
Due to the fact that the events happen very quickly in the network. It also saves space in MSC Panel, so it is preferable. The arrow head shows the direction of the packet.
This simply means that it is the unit which you had selected when you pressed the button to show the encapsulation diagram. It is the unit who's encapsulation you are viewing. In practice this means that the unit with the border was the last/newest unit sent from the host at the time of the progress line.
Two good ways to select which unit to view are
When you start TSC animation, it is at begin. Thus you won't see anything before you proceed with the animation. This is true even if you have already watched some parts of MSC animation because TSC and MSC are not synchronized.
Another possibility is, that you have chosen to view a PEF or scenario that does not have TCP information. In this case TSC warns you and will not show anything.
That PEF or scenario has multiple flows. The end of x-axis is at that timestamp where the whole data transfer ends, not at that timestamp where some particular flow ends.
There are not. However, particularly in the case of ACK packets, it is common to have multiple packets that have same sequence number (ACK number) and are sent very near of each other. In this case packets are also drawn such that they overlap each other. You can put your cursor over that packet and you should see some number telling how many overlapping packets there are. Other possibility is to use scale sliders to separate packets from each other.
Because it is not wise. TSC uses packets sequence number (ACK number) to place it in y-axis. In different flows, packets have different sequence numbers (and thus ACK numbers) and this makes it impossible to print all of them at same time.
The language selection menu has also been translated, so if it is localized into a language that you don't know, you can find it by selecting the fourth menu item from the left and its bottommost sub-menu. (It might also prove interesting to take a moment or two to learn what the word "language" is in all the localized languages!)
First of all, settings dialog is divided to three parts:
MSC settings contains one tab for each layer present in the animation, plus one tab for scale setting, and one tab for performance settings.
TSC settings contains one tab for animation settings, one tab for graphical elements, one tab for notices and one tab for unit variables.
From general settings, you can save current settings, restore default settings or load previously saved settings. From there you can also change language.