Skip to main content

SharpPcap's 10 year anniversary

I was updating the CodeProject SharpPcap tutorial and noticed that it's been 10 years since the project was originally started.

If you've ever been interested in trying out packet capture and network analysis, SharpPcap provides a pretty easy way to get started. The source download package comes with several examples that are easy to build under Visual Studio or MonoDevelop. Check out the CodeProject tutorial. If you have any questions you can post on the forums there or on the SourceForge project page.

Some work on network packet analysis got me looking for libraries that could help. I wanted to develop the analysis application in C#/.NET to reduce the overall development time vs. C/C++. Rather than reinventing the wheel it seemed useful to build on the SharpPcap library, created in 2004. The original author, Tamir Gal, passed the maintenance of the project over to me in 2008. Since then the codebase has been rewritten and cleaned up, unit tests added, and the packet parsing/generation code completely re-architected and split into a library separate from the capture code, into Packet.Net.

The project has seen a range of version control systems. The start of the project pre-dates my involvement but I migrated from cvs to svn in 2008 and then from svn to git around October 2009.

A wide array of packet formats can be parsed and generated by Packet.Net:


The CodeProject tutorial has been relatively well maintained and has over half a million views so far. The tutorial is actually in version control along with the rest of the code at Sourceforge. You can check out the git repository in your web browser.

The pace of development has slowed in the past few years, somewhat from my not using it. And I suspect also because it covers a large portion of packet formats, so it may be doing most of what people want it to do.

Project statistics

I thought it would be neat to look at the statistics on project downloads over the life of the project so far. Here are some project stats taken from the SourceForge project stats page. It has been so long I can't remember whether the project was migrated to SourceForge in 2007 or whether that might have been when SourceForge started gathering detailed statistics.

Over 100k downloads in the past 7 years

Even though SharpPcap and Packet.Net support Windows, Mac and Linux, some 94% of downloads come from Windows. This is likely due to .NET/C# being most popular on Windows.

Downloads by month

The future

PcapNg is the most frequently requested feature. PcapNg has several improvements over the original pcap file format, including things like nanosecond timestamps.

If you are looking for a network analysis tool to hack on, adding PcapNg support to SharpPcap would be a worthy project. We use git so feel free to fork from the SourceForge git repository onto GitHub and send me questions, pull requests, or patches.

I'm also available, on a contract basis, to implement improvements or changes to SharpPcap/Packet.Net for your specific application.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Debugging an imprecise bus access fault on a Cortex-M3

This information may apply to other cortex series processors but is written from practical experience with the Cortex-M3. Imprecise bus access faults are ambiguous, as noted by the term "imprecise". Compared to precise bus errors, imprecise errors are much trickier to debug and especially so without a deep understanding of arm processors and assembly language. Imprecise and precise flags are found in the BusFault status register, a byte in the CFSR (Configurable Fault Status Register). BusFault status register bits The definition for imprecise and precise bits is: [2] IMPRECISERR Imprecise data bus error: 0 = no imprecise data bus error 1 = a data bus error has occurred, but the return address in the stack frame is not related to the instruction that caused the error. When the processor sets this bit to 1, it does not write a fault address to the BFAR. This is an asynchronous fault. Therefore, if it is detected when the priority of the current pr
5 comments
Read more

Travelling on Spirit airlines out of Boston Logan airport? Here are some tips.

I attended CES 2017 in Las Vegas. Booking the trip late I ended up on Spirit airlines. It was both non-stop, making it six hours to Las Vegas from Boston, and affordable, less than $300 for a one way trip compared to around $700 with JetBlue. Here are some tips that might help you when travelling on Spirit from Boston Logan airport. Eat Spirit is located in the B-terminal, gates B-37 and 38, with its own TSA security checkpoint. While it does have restrooms and places to sit the food selection is limited to a single food stand. I'd recommend eating at the Legal C Bar (number 77 in the image below) prior to going through the terminal security checkpoint. The food and service there were great. Drink The water and other drinks are cheaper if you buy them at the food cart rather than on the flight. Seats The seats on Spirit don't recline. They do this to reduce weight, seat cost, seat maintenance costs, and so seats don't impact the free space of other passengers,
3 comments
Read more

Graco Swing By Me - Battery to AC wall adapter modification

If you have one of these Graco battery powered swings you are probably familiar with the cost of C batteries! The swing takes four of them and they only last a handful of days. I'm not sure if the newer models support being plugged into the wall but ours didn't. If you are a little familiar with electronics and soldering, here is a rough guide on how you can modify yours to plug in! I wasn't sure how exactly to disassemble the swing side where the batteries were. I was able to open up the clamshell a bit but throughout this mod I was unable to determine how to fully separate the pieces. I suspect that there is some kind of a slip plate on the moving arm portion. The two parts of the plastic are assembled and the moving arm portion with the slip plate is slid onto the shaft. Because of the tension in that slip plate it doesn't want to back away, and because of the mechanicals that portion of the assembly doesn't appear accessible in order to free it. I was
Post a Comment
Read more