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Acterna DominoNAS
Formerly Wavetek Wandel Goltermann, Acterna has a history of making products that deliver impeccable performance, which inspires a high level of confidence in its offerings. Its recent solutions follow that tradition. Acterm sent us DominoNAS, a bundle of products that met our testing requirements. DominoNAS can be configured in a number of ways. Ours included a Fast Ethernet fullduplex pod and a Gigabit Ethernet full-duplex pod, decodes provided by Acterna's Examine product, Symantec pcAnywhere for remote control of the server, client software, Acterna's fairly sophisticated Mentor expert software, and a license for three agents that could be distributed among desktops and accessed remotely without pcAnywhere.
The Mentor product provides extensive expert diagnoses and an excellent format for documenting solutions and offering comments, something that none of the other solutions offers. The Gigabit Ethernet pod let us quickly tap in to a fullduplex, gigabit connection without any fuss, unlike the Shomiti Explorer, which required configuration changes before it worked. At times, however, we were a little confused by the multiple user interfaces for the agents and pods.
In that the heart of Acterna's system is a PC server, the vendor's approach is similar to Sniffer's. One difference is that instead of having server-installed cards, external pods are attached via the parallel port. These pieces all must be located in a wiring closet close to the switches or cables that are to be monitored.
Instead of supplying client software, Acterna relies on pcAnywhere to remotely control the server from other desktops. While we weren't impressed with the elegance of this method, it did get the job done, and one advantage is that anyone running pcAnywhere can access the system. However, this access is a disadvantage from a security point of view. When we configured pcAnywhere; we don't remember being prompted to give a password and wound up logging on remotely without needing a password. Because pcAnywhere is a program for which potential hackers and crackers commonly scan,...