Wireshark · Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Ethereal and finding bad nics on Workstations and Servers

[Hansang Bae <hbae@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11:18 AM 5/24/2005, Brian Howard wrote:
>Does Ethereal have a way of capturing Nics that are going south for instance. Can it pick up a chattering Nic’s traffic. Is this something that can be tracked on  all Nics or just certain Manufacturers. Is there a way to tweak WinPcap to do this. Has anyone had any success doing this or should I be looking at another program to do this. 


No easy way of doing this.  There are a few problems with this.  Very few drivers pass up damaged frames to the application.  This is why Network General only supports a limited number of NICs (custom drivers are required to circumvent NDIS' default behavior).  Another problem is that most, if not all, modern switches will not forward damaged frames to the analyzer port.  The only vendor that I know of which supported forwarding for damaged ethernet frames was Cabletron gear.  Not sure if the current models support this anymore.

hsb