Content area
Full text
Fast Ethernet is pulling away in the 100-Mbps network race, with infrastructure vendors turning out hubs, switches and NICs with abandon. While there's nothing in a Fast Ethernet packet to decode that is any different from a 10 Mbps Ethernet packet, those Fast Ethernet packets sure do go by awfully fast. We tested five analyzers for Fast Ethernet in our Syracuse University lab. The software products included Novell's LANalyzer, Intel's LANDesk Traffic Analyst, The AG Group's EtherPeek and Cinco's NetXRay. At the top end, we pulled the wrappers off Network General's hardware-based analyzer and ever-popular Sniffer, now cruising at 100 Mbps.
A direct comparison among these products, however, wouldn't exactly be fair. Their approaches, the market segments they target and even the platforms they run on differ greatly. Our goal was to get a sense of how today's offerings perform. While we awarded Network General's Sniffer our Editor's Choice because it clearly stood above this crowd, this market is still emerging.
Network General Fast Ethernet Sniffer
Nothing could compare to the Sniffer. HP is focusing on VG AnyLAN (surprise, surprise). Azure and Comtest don't have products yet. Wandel and Goltermann submitted a DA-30, but felt that it was more of a development and benchmark tool. We agree. And the software-based products just can't keep up.
However, in many respects, this new Sniffer is a little brother to the 10-Mbps version. The interface, capture, decode and performance are similar. And setting up offset filters and decoding them is no different. But this new version has some growing to do.
It's missing the ability to run the expert system while capturing packets, for instance. When we tried to run the expert system, the Sniffer displayed a message saying that it was dropping back to classic, or normal mode. Network General says this version of the expert system, ported from the 10-Mbps product, can't run reliably online.
All is not lost, however. You can run a captured trace offline through the expert system, and the Sniffer replays the trace at a speed that won't overrun the processor. That's great, in theory, but in practice this meant taking lots of little capture snap shots, since the capture buffer without filters fills rather quickly. Filtering cut down on the...