[PLUG] help with switches

Carla Schroder carla at bratgrrl.com
Mon Feb 5 23:06:55 UTC 2007


On Monday 05 February 2007 14:43, Paul Heinlein wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Feb 2007, Carla Schroder wrote:
> > I'm having a hard time finding an answer to what seems to be a
> > simple question- what Ethernet switches include monitor ports for
> > sniffing all network traffic? I assume that unmanaged switches don't
> > have this, though it would be nice to be wrong because they're
> > inexpensive. I've been looking at all kinds of managed and 'smart'
> > switches, and I'm not seeing anything in their specs that sounds
> > like what I'm looking for. Is there some magic buzzword I should be
> > looking for? got any specific models to recommend?
>
> In Cisco land, the magic buzzword is "span port" (SPAN == Switch Port
> ANalyzer; note that traffic passed to a span port has gone through IOS
> error checking, so it's not a "raw" stream of packets). 3com switches
> use "Monitor ports."
>
> Other folks like Network Critical (www.criticaltap.com) market "TAP"
> products that sit in front of or behind a router. They essentially
> duplicate the live stream, one branch heads to the router, the other
> to the Intrusion Detection System (or the Bush Administration, if
> you're AT&T).

Oh you funny hippies, always complaining about silly stuff like hand-delivery 
of personal data to Homeloon Secuarity.

Thanks all, this helps. I found a Netgear switch for under $200 that seems to 
do what I want, so I'll bet there are more in that price range.
NetGear ProSafe FS726T 10/100Mbps + 1000Mbps
-- 
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Carla Schroder
Linux geek and random computer tamer
check out my Linux Cookbook! 
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/linuxckbk/
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