Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [ethereal-dev] Need some words from you ...

[Laurent Deniel <deniel@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Richard Sharpe wrote:
> 
> OK,
> 
> now that I have the structural parts of docbook behaving for me so I can
> produce a document, I need some content.
> 
> Could those who have developed a dissector tell me a little about how you
> came upon Ethereal, and what motivated you to start working on Ethereal?
> 
> I need stuff for the small section on a short history of Ethereal.
> 
> Regards
> -------
> Richard Sharpe, sharpe@xxxxxxxxxx
> Samba (Team member, www.samba.org), Ethereal (Team member, www.zing.org)
> Contributing author, SAMS Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours
> Author, Special Edition, Using Samba

I was using regularly tcpdump on Unix and an incomplete and unmaintained
GUI tcpview. I had also a proprietary GUI for protocol dissection and 
filtering but it was non portable, buggy and unmaintained. 
So I was looking for a GUI based on top of libpcap/tcpdump and for years
I hadn't found one. 
Two (or three ?) years ago, I was really thinking about writing one myself 
under the GPL license when I find the ethereal WEB pages. After compiling
and running ethereal 0.3.x on Linux, I was impressed and I decided to start
development, first by sending fixes, then by writing some dissectors 
(e.g. FDDI, OSI, GIOP) and adding or enhancing some other functionality that
I need (name resolution, real time capture and the field filtering which is
one of the features I like and use the most). 

Now, more and more developer are joining us and that's a good point (since
I have less and less time to enhance ethereal further :-( 
I use it often, though and it already has all the features I really need.
That's great. Please continue guys. 

My future contributions (when dissectors and other stuff are stabilized a bit)
might be a more complete protocol statistics and a GUI for field selection
and filtering).

Laurent.

--
Laurent DENIEL        | E-mail: deniel@xxxxxxxxxxx
Paris, FRANCE         |         laurent.deniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
                      | WWW   : http://www.worldnet.fr/~deniel
    All above opinions are personal, unless stated otherwise.