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.
Looking forward to Sharkfest ’11
I’ve been looking over the session schedule for Sharkfest ’11. Once again Janice and Sheri have created an event which guarantees a wealth of knowledge and insight for everyone attending.
What to expect 🔗Sharkfest is small. This is on purpose. We limit the size of the conference in order to allow more one-on-one communication between the attendees and presenters.
It has a high knowledge density. Our strategy is to gather together a bunch of people who are excited about Wireshark and protocol analysis, and know what the heck they’re talking about. We do our best to make sure the presentations focus on usable information with a minimum of fluff.
How to get the most out of Sharkfest 🔗Sharkfest is active, not passive. Mingle. Compare notes. Many of the attendees are Wireshark power users, but many are not. Everyone has something insightful to share. The worst thing you can do is keep to yourself.
For the past three years I’ve had the opportunity to witness the top people in protocol analysis exchanging and sharing ideas. I look forward to seeing the same thing this year.