The Joy of Ethereal

Ethereal really saved our bacon recently on an MSS + SIP project. Calls from one gateway worked, but another gateway in California wouldn't work. Turned out that the RTP packet length was 20 msec on the "good" gateway, and 10 msec on the "bad" one.

Whoever thought up the idea of human-readable message protocols should get a Nobel Prize. Protocols like SIP, HTTP and RSS are so much easier to troubleshoot because of this. The bad old days of RPC, ASN.1, and ISDN are hopefully nearly gone.

Of course, security may force encryption of the human-readable protocols : so we may end up back where we started...