Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: [ethereal-dev] What should be in version 1.0?

[Gerald Combs - Unicom Communications <gerald@xxxxxxxxxx>]

  The main purpose of this letter is to get a discussion going about where
development should head in order to release Ethereal 1.0.  Even the
project is still in early development, I thought it would be helpful to
share my vision of what 1.0 might look like, and solicit visions from all
of you. 

  Before I get into the vision-sharing stuff, I'd like to take a moment to
thank all of you.  When I started writing Ethereal, I didn't expect to
recieve such an outpouring of contributions and ideas.  You guys are truly
astounding.

  I'd also like to give a quick update on the CVS situation.  I intended
to read up on the CVS documentation this weekend, but it just didn't
happen.  I got a CVS server up and running recently, and it seems to be
working OK. 

  In order to keep my slowness from becoming an impediment to development,
I'm going to go ahead and give everybody who is currently an "active
developer" a local account on pow.zing.org.  This is where the web site
and CVS server reside.  There isn't a formal definition for an "active
developer" at the moment, but looking through the list of contributions
that have come in so far, it seems pretty obvious that Gilbert, Hannes,
Mike, Deniel, and Bobo qualify.  Could all of you (except Gilbert -
he already has an account :)) send me private email with your preferred
username, (crypted) password, shell, etc?  Along with CVS access, this
will give everyone a SPARCLinux box to test things on if needed.


  Now, on with the vision thing.  As stated on the home page, my
goal for Ethereal is to have a product that is of commercial quality,
comparable to products like NetXRay, Etherpeek, and even the NAI Sniffer.
I want a program so good that whenever magazines like Network Computing
and NetworkWorld review a commercial analyzer, hordes of people send in
letters to the editor saying that the product is crap, and that if you
_really_ want an analyzer, you should check out Ethereal.  :)

  Seriously, it would be great to have something that any network or
system admin can rely on to make their job a easier.  There has been
a lot of progress so far, but I think development needs to be done in
several areas before version 1.0 is released:

  - Gilbert and I had a discussion a while back, and we both agree
    that we need more functionality from libpcap than is currently
    available.  LBL might accept patches for bug fixes, but they might
    not want mods to handle other file formats, network hardware, or
    extended filter directives.

    The idea that Gilbert and I had was to come out with our own
    modified version of pcap.  We could call it Epcap (short for
    {Ethereal|Experimental|Enhanced} pcap).

  - Mike has been kind enough to start work on TCP connection
    reconstruction.  This will pave the way for things like real-time
    connection monitoring and statistics generation.

  - No one has specifically asked for it, but I have a feeling that
    internationalization would be a welcome addition.  I'm not sure if
    it should be a compile-time or a run-time option, however.

  - There are many things about the current interface that leave a
    lot to be desired.  To me, a good interface is one that helps a
    novice novice user along, but doesn't impede a power user.  So many
    applications fail to do one or both of these; I'm determined not to
    let it happen with Ethereal.

  - There isn't much validation or range checking in the packet dissection
    routines at the present time.  This needs to be fixed, for reasons
    of security and stability.

  - Alarms would be a very useful feature.  It would be useful to be
    able to set up a filter that performs actions when matched, such
    as sending email, or playing a sound.  Imagine getting paged when
    someone from a specific IP address starts probing your network,
    or annoying your co-workers by setting up a machine in the corner
    that plays 'ping' and 'arp' noises.

  - Although it's external to the application, I'd also like to see some
    online resources for Ethereal, such as a manual, filter library,
    and a database of troubleshooting problems and solutions.

  Well, enough of my rambling.  What do _you_ think should go into
version 1.0?

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 ***** *****  Gerald Combs                  gerald@xxxxxxxxxx
  ***   ***   Resident megalomaniac         http://www.unicom.net
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