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From: morgan@jessica.stanford.edu (RL "Bob" Morgan)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans
Subject: Re: LANalyzer User Feedback
Message-ID: <1991Feb6.013353.18816@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 6 Feb 91 01:33:53 GMT
References: <1991Feb4.221957.23993@infonode.ingr.com> <938@nih-csl.nih.gov>
Sender: news@portia.Stanford.EDU (Mr News)
Organization: Academic Information Resources
Lines: 45


> how about the Wandel and Goltermann?  (DA-30)

They came by here the other day with one of these babies (it's a
Network Monitor, for those who missed the thread), and it's certainly
quite a package.

What they've done is couple a 386 (SX, I think) PC-on-a-board in the
same chassis as a Transputer-based CPU, and several slots on which
interface cards for different media can be inserted.  They showed us
(as I recall) a two-port Ethernet board, which also has a transputer
(a specialized sort-of RISC chip from Inmos) on it.  The unit also had
a token ring board in it.  You can get X.25 serial too.  Each of these
boards has a bunch of memory on it too.  It has a small built-in
screen or you can attach a standard PC-style large monitor.  Also,
there's a set of LEDs beside the screen that light up to show levels
of network activity.

It does all the usual things with capturing and decoding frames,
triggering on different events, etc.  In my biased opinion the decode
display didn't look as good as the Sniffer, but it looked OK.  I
believe they intend to sell modules to decode different protocol
suites as separate items.

The hip thing is that the transputer part can run serious programs
independently of the PC part.  They even provide a built-in
programming language (I think I heard something about compiling into
Occam, the language usually associated with the Transputer) that you
can use right on-screen, with lots of built-in network-related
constructs.  Once you've written them (or bought them, I suppose), the
programs can be executed from a menu.

One example program they showed us generated traffic on the net,
lighting up their traffic-level LEDs in sequence, one per keystroke.
One could imagine programs that did lots of things in terms of
capturing data, generating frames based on captured stuff, etc.
Output files are saved as DOS and can be sent across the net if you
wish.

All in all it's pretty impressive.  The rub:  it starts at $40K.
Their access info was in the previous message.

 - RL "Bob" Morgan
   Networking Systems
   Stanford