Wild exaggeration. Wireshark is very limited in what it can do and has gained few if any new power-user features (especially when it comes to extensibility and programmability) in more than a decade of development. The macOS-specific functionality in this very post has been available for years.
Anyone who relies on non-trivial packet capture or processing workflows, ditches Wireshark (optionally reusing dissectors) and writes custom tooling (which is very easy to do).
Even the dissector stuff feels so.. broken? unmaintained? The lua api is very annoying to use and python support was removed over a decade ago. Have not used the C API so maybe thats just what most people use and its good, but for my usecase I usually just want to quickly sketch out a view for a custom protocol that I can see in the UI.
I would absolutely love for someone to write a good alternative to wireshark.
And I know with certainty that it did not work when I wrote my previous blog post about this, back in 2021.
So, from what I can see, the specific functionality to dissect Darwin metadata in pcapng captures, from macOS' tcpdump, has not been "...available for years.".
I think it is not an exaggeration to say that without Wireshark, so much of modern computing would never have been developed and we would be stuck in the past. The amount of visibility it gives is immense. I have used it for years, decades now.
VPNs have existed for a long time, while wireshark is the current new curve, there will always be the next curve that emerges and evolves to replace the current one.
armitron|4 months ago
Anyone who relies on non-trivial packet capture or processing workflows, ditches Wireshark (optionally reusing dissectors) and writes custom tooling (which is very easy to do).
ellg|4 months ago
I would absolutely love for someone to write a good alternative to wireshark.
c0nsumer|4 months ago
Can you provide a reference? From what I can see this dissection was only added about five months ago: https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/commit/389f6356c9d5...
(And just hit release with 4.6.0.)
And I know with certainty that it did not work when I wrote my previous blog post about this, back in 2021.
So, from what I can see, the specific functionality to dissect Darwin metadata in pcapng captures, from macOS' tcpdump, has not been "...available for years.".
bobthebuilders|4 months ago
fujigawa|4 months ago
> People don’t realize there’s no real alternative
EtherPeek/OmniPeek has entered the chat
There were tools before Wireshark, and there will be tools after it's long gone. Just because you haven't heard of them doesn't mean they don't exist!
BestHackerOnHN|4 months ago
[deleted]
j45|4 months ago
VPNs have existed for a long time, while wireshark is the current new curve, there will always be the next curve that emerges and evolves to replace the current one.
trillic|4 months ago