Trent and I spent most of this week hanging with the great folks and uber geeks at Sharkfest; If you use Wireshark for packet analysis, you really should look into attending Sharkfest. This was my third year at Sharkfest and it’s becoming a geek reunion of sorts… a great place to learn about wireless troubleshooting and share ideas.

Our presentation was titled Visualizing RF (generic title so we could change the content last minute if we wanted to), and was focused on how RF interference affects the packets in Wireshark and what it looks like at the physical level, along with some tips for filtering various Wi-Fi packets in Wireshark. You can download our power point slides.

Wednesday night was the vendor reception, which was basically three hours of everyone eating hors d’oeuvres and mingling around the small vendor tables showing off our wares. As usual we had a steady crowd at our table. We had Chanalyzer Pro and Chanalyzer for iPad on display. We met a lot of MetaGeek customers and fans, and came home with only half a Wi-Spy DBx because we’d sold or given away everything else that we had! Although almost everyone at the Sharkfest vendor reception is our target market, demoing our stuff there doesn’t feel like we have to “sell” as opposed to the way Interop feels. At Sharkfest it’s more like we’re geeking out with a few friends, showing them the cool stuff we’re working on and them sharing crazy stories with us about wireless issues caused by police radar guns, salmon boats, and window heaters.

The other presentations we attended were great and I learned a lot about using Wireshark effectively, scripting, and the history of some of the open source network diagnostic apps (tcpdump, libpcap, and Wireshark). Overall it was a great conference and we look forward to next year’s Sharkfest!