North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Let's talk about Distance Sniffing/Remote Visibility

  • From: Travis Dawson
  • Date: Thu Mar 28 15:58:20 2002

At 06:27 AM 3/28/2002, [email protected] 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