need help understanding class matching

[Simon Hobson]

jeffrey j donovan wrote:

>  > Really ?
>>  The hardware field (for an ethernet network) will contain a 1 
>>(0x01) followed by the 6 bytes of MAC address - it does not contain 
>>an ascii representation of those bytes. To fetch the OUI of the MAC 
>>address you do need to get bytes 1 to 3 of the hardware and compare 
>>with a 3 byte string.
>
>okay not really, the syntax works but the clients are not matching.

That's what I thought

>i did see where someone did a conversion prior to the substring 
>line. but I did not understand it;
>binary-to-ascii (16, 8, "", substring (hardware, 6, 1))),2) );
>
>
>im thinking this might work
>
>ahhh,..
>i found this
>http://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/962
>
>class "sip-phone" {
>match if (binary-to-ascii (16,8,":",substring(hardware, 0, 4)) = "1:0:3:e3")
>or (binary-to-ascii (16,8,":",substring(hardware, 0, 4)) = "1:0:3:6b")
>or (binary-to-ascii (16,8,":",substring(hardware, 0, 4)) = "1:0:7:eb");
>log (info, (binary-to-ascii (16,8,":",substring(hardware, 0, 4))));
>}
>
>makes sense when I see it.

You do **NOT** have to do this. You can if you wish, but it is not necessary.

binary-to-ascii does what it says, and with the options specified 
will convert the binary hardware address to a string representation. 
Then you can match against a string.

However, you can save some typing, and processing time*, by just 
specifying the match strings as the binary string you want to match 
against.
* When a packet comes in, you have to do the binary to ascii 
conversion, for each packet and for each time it's used in a class 
match.

so you can do :
binary-to-ascii (16,8,":",substring(hardware, 1, 3)) = "0:11:ba3"
or you can so :
substring(hardware, 1, 3) = "\x00\x11\xba"

and I think (someone correct me if I'm wrong) you can write that 
latter one as (note the lack of quotes) :
substring(hardware, 1, 3) = 00:11:ba


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Simon Hobson

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