Testing is Rocket Science Not Brain Surgery

One definition of the word Ethereal is “lacking material substance”, the Ethereal(www.ethereal.com) network protocol analyzer however; is a true masterpiece of the open source, freeware movement.  Why it isn’t a commercial product is beyond me, maybe I’ll never understand the whole “free” software movement.  To be honest I don’t want too, and refuse to change my stance overall on the idea of using it in the enterprise.  But I will by all means use it in a non–critical capacity when I can.  It has a clean UI, decent help, and gets the job done.  While its fairly rudimentary in function, it still has great form.  Download it and have some fun, I’ve been running it at home and on the job for a few weeks and have found it to be stable and quite capable.

Couple it with your favorite diff tool(Altova’s DiffDog) and you’ve got packet level verification of your tests, which if you’ve performance tested enough will prove invaluable.  Fail to do so from time to time and you may fall victim to the notorious “false positive.”