Guy Harris wrote:
>
> On Tue, May 09, 2000 at 07:28:23AM -0500, Gilbert Ramirez wrote:
> > Our Win32 port of Ethereal got a "5 socket" rating in the Winsock
> > Programmer's FAQ:
> >
> > http://www.cyberport.com/~tangent/programming/winsock/resources/debugging.html
> >
> > And judging by the HTTP logs on ethereal.zing.org, the win32 port is *very*
> > popular.
>
> Some of the reason for that might involve the numbers on the page in
> question that happen to be followed by the "$" character. :-) (Some of
> the sniffers they mention aren't quite so expensive, though.)
I'd like to clarify that review a bit. First, yes, price was a factor.
Other factors that elevated it above payware offerings were source code
availability and extensibility: these are very useful features for
network developers.
Second, the review wasn't really for the Win32 port, because I have much
less experience with it -- when ranking Ethereal, I did it for the
original Unix platform, simply out of fairness. My rankings don't
consider platform much at all, except that there is a slight bias
against DOS for some reason. :) My view is, it's up to the reader to
weight my ratings with their own platform preferences. Given that, I
write the reviews to the strengths of the product on its main platform.
Finally, rankings were given with an eye towards the user being a
developer, rather than a network admin. The top 3 Windows sniffers blow
Ethereal away with actual breadth of features, but then, developers
don't need to be alerted via pager when network traffic levels go above
a certain level. That bias throws out a lot of these competing
sniffers' features.
Thanks for the site mention. I hope some of you guys out there find the
FAQ useful.
--
= Warren Young, maintainer of the Winsock Programmer's FAQ at:
= http://www.cyberport.com/~tangent/programming/winsock/
=
= ICBM Address: 36.8274040 N, 108.0204086 W, alt. 1714m
