syndication
On Smart People
Tue, July 29, 2008 - 7:59 PM PST
I've needed to write tools to analyze packet captures a few times - my needs sometimes go beyond what you can easily get with Wireshark/Ethereal. Let me be the first to say that it's very easy to write an imperfect hack that solves one problem given known inputs, but to write a robust general purpose tool... now that's a trick.
Since it's this hard to get it right when just processing datafiles to analyze traffic after the fact, I really have an appreciation for the code in network stacks and daemons that handles things like TCP flow control, HTTP caching, and SSL but to name a few. Smart people out there...