Snnifers...Possible to read the data

[anjali]

tiger shark..thanks buddy.. Now it is pretty clear...

To summarize..

1) Sniffers work best with Hub type of technology where are packets are broadcasted into the network...

2) Incase of a switched Netqwork .. the placement of Sniffer is very important...

3) Sniffers would reply on winpcaps or libpcap.. to enable them to behave on promiscus mode....

4) You need a sound knowledge of TCP to be able to make some sense of the packets trapped by your sniffer....

5) If a person is able to sniff the network for long.. he/she can be able to trap passwords that travel as simple text...

6) It tells you the how ur network traffic is made of.... (TCP, UDP, ICMP etc.)

If you feel I have missed anything pls... mention that....

Regards

Kalp

[nicechandru]

I am a AntiOnline Newbie..
If you have a switched network like tiger said , u can put the port in which ur system has connected to switch as analyser port ( SPAN in CISCO )
http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/~jrmorri...isco/span.html
when u put like that all the packets going out from all the users in ur network will come to ur
port also (copies of the packets) whatevet the types of the packets ... (broadcast,multicast, unicat)
And u can use sniffer like Ethereal.. coz it is free and really easy to use.
But if u encrypt ur outgoing msgs then getting ur password by sniffing is little harder.

Now my question....
1. Can i monitor all the users of the network and can i plot the graph for individual users for how much bandwidth they are using and howlong. ( Even if i can plot just for HTTP or FTP that is enough for me )
I tried using many softwares like ( solarwinds,network probe,trafficmax ) ... But i am satisfied with anything.
plz suggest me some software for this or a way to use the existing softwares.