At 06:27 AM 3/28/2002, CARL.P.HIRSCH@sargentlundy.com wrote:
It seems to me that the means available are A) a very expensive distributed NAI Sniffer installation B) standard RMON probes and the NMS of your choice and C) A linux box with a ton of interfaces running Ethereal accessed via Xwindows/VNC/whatever.
Ran into this and went with C but couldn't fit as many NIC's in the newly christened sniffer box that I wanted. My solution was to take an Cisco Cat 2900 (and a Foundry Workgroup switch later) and I worked up a series of rancid scripts (since changed to SNMP Set commands in a perl script) that would enable and disable ports along with setting the port mirroring. This gave me 22 ports to play with, each into a different switch so that I could directly monitor almost every FE port in the Co-lo. Its a little 'hacky' but it works surprisingly well (after a bit of up-front work). I haven't attempted to monitor a GigE port yet but Im sure that a Cisco Cat 3508 would be able to do the job as well. Hope this helps someone. -tdawson -Network Geek (Bit Pusher) -BlueMartini Software