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Comment by rabidsnail | Hacker News Reader

Why would I want this? When I'm doing protocol analysis I'm usually doing packet capture at the same time, which a web app can't do for me since it's not in my lan. I've never been in a situation where I ran pcap by itself and then did offline analysis on the data.

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I could see a large number of possibilities: remotely debugging network issues, collaboratively reversing a protocol, collaborative forensic analysis, etc.

The ability to make this into a collaborative tool is great -- I'd love to turn this into a protocol reversing tool where I can work with people in real time to figure things out.

Edit: Just noticed it's not open source. That's a real shame, but hopefully someone will use this as inspiration for an open, flexible tool with the same concept.

Sure, thats cool, but a single web app is not the place for that.

Instead, places like GitHub and the like need to get smarter about what they are actually storing and facilitate collaborative analysis that way.

Don't you do remote analysis ever? Have your client/friend/whoever do the capture and send it to you for analysis?

That's at least one use case I can imagine.

Even than, why on earth I should skip my own copy of WireShark and use CloudShark?

I think its strength is definitely when you are collaborating with other folks. Like a call center of engineers working on a ticket. They could leave little sticky notes per packet. It's definitely meant for a shared environment.

I'm not 100% sure a call-center environment is the best use-case example for this application. I can see it being valuable in extremely small development teams, but the amount of tech that goes into a call center (especially one that makes use of call monitoring/recording systems for QA and KPI refinement/enhancement), having worked in one almost entirely negates the need to store capture files in the cloud.

Caveat: of course, my comment itself is negated in the case of a call-center that's has a poorly designed storage network.

I assume you aren't on OS X where Wireshark is fugly, clunky, and takes forever to boot.

Yes. I'm not aware of OS X issues.

But isn't wireshark fugly and clunky on all platforms? I love the tool, but the UI has a lot to be desired. I'm frankly a bit surprised that they opted for copying it instead of remaking it.

Agreed. I use it on Linux and OSX and my only real beef with it on OSX is that it runs under X11. Id rather the mildly clunky OSX interface where I know where everything is than a total new foreign web interface. I guess its just a matter of taste.

Even if it has no use its an interesting practical thing to try to do.

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