WAN technologies

Going through the WAN technologies topics.....

Frame Relay
ISDN
T1/E1
PPP
ATM

etc etc.....

Will post interesting stuff as i learn through it.....

Switch

The Complete Guide to LAN Switching Technology - Switch book by Rich Siefert

Switched Lan sniffing!!!!!!!

I wanted to sniff packets from all ports in a switch, and the first thing I tried to do was to attach a PC to one port and run a netywork analyser software like ethreal in it. Then suddenly I realized my blunder. Unlike shared lan, a port in a switch receives only the traffic destined for that port....!

So I was curious on how sniffing was done in switches and found these technologies:
1. Port Mirroring
2. Switch Mirroring
In Port Mirroring, you map one monitored port to another mirrored port. So the traffic in monitored port will get reflected in mirrored port and can be used for analysis by a network analyser.
In Switch Mirroring the traffic from all ( or the configured ones) can be reflected in the mirrored port. The mirrored port shuld hav greater bandwidth to handle, this, but this mode is useful as all traffic can be seen in the mirrored port.

Another solution would be for Switch to support RMON MIBs. These MIBs give necessary information about the data transfer statistics in switch.

Magic Quadrant for Campus LANs report

Evaluation of Enterprise Switches: Report:
Cisco remains the leader in the Campus LAN Magic Quadrant; however, cracks are showing, and viable competitors, such as HP ProCurve and Foundry Networks, are rapidly increasing share.

- http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/hp/153760.html

IETF Workgroups

Started following IETF workgroups, and became a member of DHC workgroup - http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/dhc-charter.html