Used Cars and Stub Installers
The Wireshark development team works hard to earn the respect of our users. This includes making sure that downloading and installing Wireshark is as easy and trouble-free as possible. Right now the vast majority of our users can go to www.wireshark.org, follow the big green arrows, and immediately download the appropriate Wireshark package for their platform.
For many years a number of third party sites have also offered Wireshark downloads. Typing “wireshark download” into your favorite search engine will turn up a bunch of them, usually just below links to wireshark.org. These sites are popular and often provide valuable services such as reviews and malware prescreening. They also reside outside the Wireshark ecosystem — we don’t link to them and aren’t affiliated with any of them.
"This is the Cadillac of invasive toolbars at a Chevy price!" Sometimes these sites abuse their relationship with their users. For example a few months ago Download.com started using a stub installer which tries to get you to install various toolbars and who-knows-what-else before it installs the package you ultimately want, much like a sleazy car salesman trying to bundle add-ons you don’t want or need.
Sharkfest ’11 Recap
Categories:
Announcement
The fourth annual Sharkfest was held last week. If you missed it, don’t worry. We are busy uploading all of the presentations to sharkfest.wireshark.org.
The conference started with a keynote by Dr. Steve McCanne, CTO of Riverbed. He described the history of BPF and how its optimizing compiler works. It was interesting to see all of the problems he ran into and the solutions he found. The presentation was easy to follow despite its technical level. (Steve created BPF, and co-wrote tcpdump and libpcap.)
The keynote set the tone for the rest of the conference, which featured a lot of talented speakers. Jeff Carrell’s IPv6 was so popular it had be repeated several times over the course of the conference. Lara Chappell, Hansang Bae, and Betty Dubois drew their usual huge crowds. The other presenters did great jobs as well.
People have great ideas for improving Wireshark. Plenty of these ideas and suggestions were heaped our way throughout the conference, especially during the last two sessions. I hope to spend some time this summer implementing some of them.
Wireshark is very much a community-owned project.
We’re not Participating in World IPv6 Day. Mostly.
Tomorrow is World IPv6 Day, the largest full-frontal test of IPv6 to date. It is going to be a historic event. It’s also one in which wireshark.org will and won’t be participating.
In one sense every day is IPv6 day here and tomorrow will be just another day. Most of our web sites (anonsvn, ask, this blog, bugs, buildbot, sharkfest, and wiki) have been fully dual-stacked for some time. You can reach them over both IPv4 and IPv6 and so far it’s been working pretty well. The big exception to this is the main web site, which still only has an A record. We can add an AAAA record at any time, but I’ve been holding off doing so until well *after* World IPv6 Day.
My concern is that having an AAAA record in place for www.wireshark.org tomorrow will cause unnecessary problems. If anyone runs into trouble reaching dual-stacked sites I don’t want to impede their ability to troubleshoot the problem by making Wireshark difficult to download.
We’ll add the AAAA record for www.wireshark.org in a few weeks.
P.S. According to the SCM revision logs IPv6 support was introduced in Wireshark in 1998.
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