tcpslice blast from the past
bms@ committed a patch I submitted in response to a PR (bin/13691 in case anyone cares, filed back in 1999, with my patch submitted in 2000). This was way back before I got my commit bit, and back when I was a researcher doing analysis of traffic traces. The problem involved tcpslice, a program that used to ship with tcpdump that subsets a tcpdump file. tcpslice was written by an old friend of mine, Vern Paxson, and it’s quite clever in its implementation. Basically, the problem was it didn’t deal with >2GB files very well, and it wasn’t Y2K compliant. Both of these were problematic for a research project I was working on at the time.
Both problems have since been fixed in the original sources, and are reflected in the version that we have in the FreeBSD ports tree (I think it’s net/tcpslice). But for some reason we still have this really ancient copy in our base system. bms@ applied my patch, but he also wants to know if we should just kill the version in the base system. I think it should go away because heck, the Y2K bug made this program almost unusable and nobody (except for apparently a handful of us) noticed.
Anyways…it was kind of weird and cool to see this ancient patch hit the source tree.