Wireshark 1.0

Its not breaking news, since it happened in March, but Wireshark 1.0 has been released. The news, for me at least, was that Wireshark even existed, never heard of it before. Somebody mentioned it recently when we were trying to diagnose a networking problem.

Rushing to the Wireshark site and downloading it, I ran it and said "this is great but it sure looks an awful lot like Ethereal." Ahhh, yeah! From the web site:

In May of 2006, Gerald Combs (the original author of Ethereal) went to work for CACE Technologies (best known for WinPcap). Unfortunately, he had to leave the Ethereal trademarks behind.

This left the project in an awkward position. The only reasonable way to ensure the continued success of the project was to change the name. This is how Wireshark was born.

I was also pleased to see that the interface had been upgraded to GTK2 since I last used Ethereal.

If you ever deal with networking problems and you're not familiar with Wireshark/Ethereal, make a mental note, it'll save your bacon one day.