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Ok, I started last night so this is pretty basic. I wrote a quick screensaver in VB that uses a WinPcap wrapper (http://www.lorenzocerulli.tk/) and bounces packets around the screen. It does not support multiple screens yet, anyone know of how I can manage that? I’m not sure how to find out how many monitors someone has, and how they are oriented, once I have that it’s no problem. Anyway, the source is included, along with the binary.
I don't have any applications for looking at the vb source. But I ran the screensaver and all I got was a url to your site bouncing around. Does that just mean I didn't have any packets being sent or received?
Oh, go into the config and choose a network card. LEt me know if that fixes it or not.
what config? That may be it though, because I have wireless and a normal ethernet card on here. So maybe it's trying to use the normal ethernet card while I'm on wireless. But I don't know what config you're talking about. If it's something from the source I don't know how I can change that.
edit
oh, it was in the settings. And the correct one was chosen. Does it use promiscuous mode? because I don't think my wireless card supports that. Maybe later I'll go back to wired and try it with that.
Hey Irongeek,
This may be obvious, but all I get is "cannot find VBPCAP.DLL", or something close to that. I have copied this file to C:\WINNT and C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32, as well as the netscr.scr file to both of those locations, to no avail. This is a fresh Win2000 copy I installed just this morning. I unfortunately have no way to inspect VB source either right now. What am I missing?
Striek, you will also need winpcap installed:
http://winpcap.polito.it/
h3r3tic, I'm not sure why it's mpt working on yours, but yes it does use promiscuous mode (or slutty mode as I like to call it).
Amazing! This would be great on a server or firewall station, to give an overview of traffic passing through it.
If I may make a suggestion, I'd like to see it include information on which protocols are being used, and instead of printing out every packet, match packets to previous traffic and display summaries instead.
This has some amazing potential I think.
Excellent idea Irongeek!
To bad I'm not very good with graphics, I wanted to do a kind of Matrix effect with it. Maybe something like what Etherape does but with rotating nodes?
/edit:by the way, a lot of the code for decoding came from the YANA project at http://www.lorenzocerulli.tk/ . Just wanted to give them credit.
Ok, I made a better version with a readme.txt.
Steps to install:
1. copy ./bin/netscr.scr to windows directory (c:\windows\).
2. copy ./bin/ VBPCAP.DLL to windows\system32 directory (c:\windows\system32).
3. Install Winpcap from http://winpcap.polito.it/ .
4. Go to Display Properties->Screen Saver and choose netscr.
5. Click the settings button and choose your network card and speed.
I renamed it PacketFountain and posted a webpage here:
http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=s...packetfountain
It now supports more than one screen.
Man, it's kinda cool in a way, but I was finding it mega difficult to actually read any of the packets because there was so much text on the screen in loads of different sizes and colours. It made it kinda look like you hadn't used double-buffering because of all the flickering. You maybe need to look at some way to stop "packets" from moving on top of each other or something like that.
For example, you could give each packet bound boxes and do collision testing and have them bounce off each other like they bounce off the edge of the screen, or make packets go invisible as they move under other ones.
Just a suggestion,
ac
Like I said, I'm not a graphics guy. I figured I'd just put it out there for anyone that wanted some quick example code or wanted to modify it.
Just wanted to let you know, it works fine when I go wired. I wish my wireless card supported promiscuous mode :(. Peace.