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From: lars@spectrum.CMC.COM (Lars Poulsen)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: TCP/IP/Ethernet Protocol Analyser - which to buy
Message-ID: <1990Aug16.182028.12485@spectrum.CMC.COM>
Date: 16 Aug 90 18:20:28 GMT
References: <64884@yarra.oz.au>
Organization: Rockwell CMC
Lines: 30

In article <64884@yarra.oz.au> chris@yarra.oz.au (Chris Jankowski) writes:
>              Is Sniffer so much better to justify 6 times higher price?
Yes. If not, they would have gone out of business a long time ago.

>What are the deficiencies of the low end products?

In order to keep up with the traffic in promiscusous mode, you must have
[1] a powerful CPU on the ethernet card
[2] a large RAM on the ethernet card
[3] hardware address filtering in order to capture traffic with multiple
    destination addresses that do not form a multicast group.

This means that standard commercial ethernet PC cards are not the right
thing to use. The special-engineered ethernet card is most of the
premium cost.

But the Sniffer's display and decoding software is also much more
comprehensive than what is offered with the lowend devices.

We have dozens of SUNs around here. They all come with the "Etherfind"
and "traffic" utilities, right ? Yet when we need to look at the network
traffic, we go and get the Sniffer, and put it on the desk next to that
Sun.

If you have used a Sniffer, you'll never be happy with a lowend monitor.
If you can't afford the Sniffer, you'll learn to live with what you can
afford.
-- 
/ Lars Poulsen, SMTS Software Engineer
  CMC Rockwell  lars@CMC.COM