Tag Archives: Feature Request

Contributing to Wireshark (without any coding skills!)

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For many years I was afraid to open new issues for open-source tools since I am not a coder at all and won’t ever be able to fix some of the problems. Many times I got answers like “The source is open, go ahead and fix it yourself”. This brought me to a point where I simply stopped proposing new ideas and features.

This has changed since I was at SharkFest’22 EUROPE (the Wireshark Developer and User Conference), especially at a session from Uli Heilmeier called “Contribute to Wireshark – the low hanging fruits” [PDF].

TL;DR: You don’t need to be a programmer to contribute to Wireshark! E.g., submit new feature requests, report bugs or write at the wiki.

And that is exactly what I would like to recommend to you. This post is about giving examples, that even minor errors and thoughts are appreciated by the Wireshark team. But, of course, if you actually have coding skills, please go ahead and fix some of the issues. ;)

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NTP Authentication on Pulse Connect Secure

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I initially wanted to show how to use NTP authentication on a Pulse Connect Secure. Unfortunately, it does not support NTP over IPv6, which is mandatory for my lab. Ok, after I calmed down a bit, a configured it with legacy IP and got NTP authentication running. ;) Here’s how:

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Infoblox Feature Requests

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Infoblox offers a nice product which completely serves the DHCP/DNS/IPAM aka DDI area. I really love it. Especially the centralized management aka Grid works quite stable and is easy to use (though the GUI looks a bit outdated).

However, sometimes I am little beyond the daily business and labbing with next-generation features such as #IPv6, #DNSSEC, #NTP authentication, CAA, SSHFP, and so on. Not everything within these topics is included, hence a couple of feature requests. Just a living list from my perspective.

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NTP Appliance: Meinberg LANTIME & SyncFire

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In case you’re responsible for an enterprise network or data center you should care about NTP. Refer to “Why should I run own NTP Servers?“. As a hobby technician you might first think about Raspberry Pis with self soldered GPS modules. Well, good idea to play with, but not reliable at all. Way to unstable, hard to update, no alerting, no service agreements, and so on.

Hence you should use a dedicated NTP appliance such as the Meinberg LANTIME NTP Time Servers. I am using a LANTIME M200 with a DCF77 correlation receiver in my lab. With this post I am showing how to set up this NTP server, giving some insights, and listing the advantages of such an appliance compared to a Raspberry Pi or any other DIY server approach. My wish list aka feature requests to this product round things up.

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Packet Capture: Network Time Protocol (NTP)

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What’s the first step in a networker’s life if he wants to work with an unknown protocol: he captures and wiresharks it. ;) Following is a downloadable pcap in which I am showing the most common NTP packets such as basic client-server messages, as well as control and authenticated packets. I am also showing how to analyze the delta time with Wireshark, that is: how long an NTP server needs to respond to a request.

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Fortinet Feature Requests

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I really like the FortiGate firewalls. They are easy to manage and have lots of functionality. However, I am also aware of some other firewall products and therefore have some feature requests to Fortinet that are not currently implemented in their firewalls. I am sometimes forwarding these FRs to the Fortinet support or to a SE, but they are not really interested in that. ;( So here is a list of my ideas that could improve the firewall. Hopefully/maybe some of them will be implemented one day…

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