Wireshark Has a New Home
Categories:
Announcement
By now you may have seen the press release and announcement about the purchase of CACE Technologies (my as-of-three-and-a-half-seconds-ago former employer) by Riverbed Technology (my new employer). In the announcement to the wireshark-users and wireshark-dev mailing lists I mentioned Riverbed’s commitment to the Wireshark community. I’d like to expand on that a bit.
Wireshark is more than a protocol analyzer. It is the foundation for relationships between several groups of people: the user community, the developer community, Wireshark University (driven by Laura Chappell), and CACE Technologies. Each one is an important part of Wireshark as a whole. We often referred to it as “the ecosystem” at CACE. It is an honor to be a part of it.
The important, wonderful, and rare thing about the ecosystem is that it benefits everyone involved. You can see this in action on Wireshark’s mailing lists, Laura’s seminars, and at SHARKFEST. It’s something that we worked hard to foster at CACE. What’s even better is that with Riverbed this commitment doesn’t change. Everyone I’ve talked to at Riverbed, from the CEO and CTO on down is committed to Wireshark and to its community.
Announcing ask.wireshark.org
There have been requests over the years for an online forum for Wireshark. I’m not too crazy about traditional forums, particularly for support. You often end up digging through a lot of not-so-useful content to get to the information you’re looking for.
(If you can see where this is going and are impatient, you can go straight to the new support Q&A site now. Otherwise read on.)
Last year Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky started Stack Exchange, a collection of question & answer sites including Stack Overflow, Server Fault, and Super User. SE fixes everything that’s wrong with traditional form software. Useful answers can be voted up by the community, and “hot” questions are listed first.
Stack Exchange is wonderful but they require you to host your content on their servers. This is goes against my control freak sensibilities, so I had to look elsewhere for a solution. I found OSQA. The software is still beta, but it’s quite functional and becoming quite popular.
Here are some of the things you can do with OSQA:
Vote questions and answers up and down 🔗This means that the good stuff floats to the top.
Antivirus Outbreak
Wednesday, August 4, 8:00 AM 🔗
We receive a phone call from someone complaining about “Wireshark Antivirus”. I take the call. The person on the other end isn’t able to provide many details other than that a program named “Wireshark Antivirus” is displaying some a shield and directing him to the cacetech.com web site.
This is new. We’ve been on the receiving end of a few false positives in the past but this is new. Some jackass is using our name do do harm.
This will not end well.