![]() This set a trajectory for the project that led to me joining CACE Technologies (aquired by Riverbed Technology in 2010) where we developed AirPcap and Pilot.” “One area that needed a lot of help was 802.11 capture. It soon became clear that we were filling a significant need in the industry and that we had a large community that needed our help,” explains Combs. “After adding a Windows installer our user community ballooned in size. It wasn't until Loris Degioanni and Gianluca Varenni wrote WinPcap, and Gilbert Ramirez (an early Ethereal developer) used it to port Ethereal Windows that it became apparent just how many people were troubleshooting networks on that platform.” Ethereal was originally written with Solaris and Linux in mind. I used various forms of UNIX along with Mac OS until the early 2000s. “But I had a near-pathological blindness to Windows early on which could have severely limited the reach of the project. “Nowadays, I joke about it,” Combs continues. I wanted to make sure that the arrangement was stable and sustainable and this ultimately led to the project's current sponsorship model.” Eventually, I ended up hosting the project's server in my employer's data center. On a couple of occasions I had to scramble to make sure my little server didn't end up in someone else's inventory - sometimes under the cover of darkness. I had a talent for finding companies that would subsequently go out of business, get acquired, or pivot to a new line of business. The arrangements were informal and worked great right up until they didn't. I ended up buying a small SPARC Station on eBay and traded consulting time with various ISPs around town for hosting. Project hosting services like GitHub and SourceForge didn't exist which meant that you had to fend for yourself. Gerald remarks about the early days, “For the first year or so, keeping the web site up and running was tenuous at best. This continued growth and development from Gerald and hundreds of developers – worldwide, have made today’s Wireshark the basis of all network diagnostic tool comparisons. When Gerald and his team of industry experts first launched Ethereal it had about four protocols and the console/main page was really quite simple compared to today’s complex and very versatile main pages with hundreds of different operation and display variables. I am sure he had no idea that his dream would become the bench mark for all future network diagnostic tools. When Ethereal started about 20 years ago, Gerald had a dream of giving technology a packet capture device that would help visualize and solve network issues. It was always Gerald’s dream to build an open source, world class network analyzer, which is now the number one downloaded open source network analyzer tool.Ī Not-So-Brief History of the World’s First Open Source Analyzer The story about Wireshark is entwined with the story of Gerald Combs, the inventor, founder and heart behind Wireshark.
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