We Have A New Sponsor
Categories:
Announcement
I’m excited to announce that Wireshark has a new home. I recently accepted a job with Sysdig, and along with that, they are now Wireshark’s primary sponsor.
I’m excited for a couple of reasons. First, I get to work with Sysdig’s founder, Loris Degioanni. We’ve been friends for a long time, and it’s difficult to summarize the impact he’s had on Wireshark. We first met in the early days of the project, back when it was still called Ethereal. At the time he was busy developing the WinPcap packet capture library, which was a natural fit for Ethereal and let us include Windows users in our community. This was a pivotal milestone for the project and it helped us grow into what it is today.
This isn’t the first time he’s asked me to join a company he founded. In 2006, my family and I moved halfway across the U.S. where I joined him at CACE Technologies and he welcomed us to our new town. We renamed the project to Wireshark and proceeded to build a line of products that complemented it.
Dedication and Disagreements
Categories:
Uncategorized
As I’ve mentioned in many of my talks about the Wireshark project, our primary goal is to help as many people as possible understand their networks as much as possible. We’ve been very fortunate over the years in this regard. Many people are passionate about this goal and have dedicated themselves to help to work toward it.
Although a group of people might agree about a particular goal, they can sometimes disagree about how to get there. When you add in personal dedication and investment, the disagreement can take on a life of its own. This happened to us recently.
Years ago when I worked at CACE Technologies we created the Wireshark Foundation1. A couple of years later, Laura Chappell came up with the idea for Wireshark University and the WCNA certification program. She worked out an agreement with CACE’s CEO to license use of Wireshark’s trademarks which they subsequently signed.
Shortly after that, Riverbed acquired CACE, along with the Wireshark Foundation. Like CACE, Riverbed has been both supportive of the project and hands-off. They pay my salary, fund SharkFest and our infrastructure, and have done so since the acquisition.
Wireshark Is Now Twenty
Categories:
Uncategorized
Twenty years ago today I announced Ethereal 0.2.0, which marks the first public release of what is now Wireshark. The release was an attempt at two things: to create an interactive protocol analyzer for Linux and Solaris so that I could do my job better, and to give back to the open source community. As it turns out the second goal had a huge effect on the first one. After the initial release developer and user communities quickly formed. Different people had different goals such as support for other platforms and protocols, troubleshooting in specific environments, education, product development, network forensics, and so on. After a while things settled down to a single goal:
To help as many people as possible understand their networks as much as possible.
As goals go that’s pretty broad and implies a lot of work. Open source project hosting services didn’t exist in 1998 so in the olden days we pretty much ate sand. For example, I made thirty releases in the first year. Twenty of them were first two months. That’s because I was our revision control system1.