Great Tool for Swimming with Network Sharks

I was looking to debug a problem involving clients connecting to FTP servers and was in need of a packet sniffer. A colleague of mine pointed me at an open source tool named "WireShark" (http://www.wireshark.org). This is a great tool. It's a bit like tcpdump, but it includes a beautiful GUI and does a great job at filtering packets and at exporting/importing data. It also run son Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.

Here's a screen shot:

From my favorite e-zine...

That last post about "what is middleware?" received a nice response from many readers - strangely, no one actually commented on the post.

Anyway - a longer version of the topic was just published in Red Hat magazine:

http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2008/03/11/what-is-middleware-in-plain-english-please/