Port Monitoring; Port Monitoring Menu - Alcatel Omni Switch/Router User Manual

Port Monitoring

An essential tool of the network engineer is a network packet capture device. A packet
capture device is usually a PC-based computer, such as the Sniffer
understanding and measuring data traffic of a network. Understanding data flow in a
based switch presents unique challenges primarily because traffic takes place inside the
switch, especially on dedicated devices.
The port monitoring feature built into OmniS/R software allows the network engineer to
examine packets to and from a specific Ethernet 10BaseT port. Port monitoring has the
following features:
• Software commands to enable and display captured port data.
• Captures data in Network General
• Limited protocol parsing (basic IP protocols and IPX) in console dump display.
• Data packets time stamped.
• One port monitored at a time.
• RAM-based file system.
• Memory buffer space from
• Statistics gathering and display
• Monitors only Ethernet 10BaseT ports
• Filtering limited to basic packet type—broadcast, multicast or unicast.
You can select to dump real-time packets to the terminal screen, or send captured data to a
file. Once a file is captured, you can FTP it to a Sniffer for viewing.
Port Mirroring
An alternate method of monitoring ports is Port Mirroring, which allows a network engineer
to attach a Sniffer to one Ethernet port and mirror traffic to and from any other Ethernet port.
Port mirroring is described in Port Mirroring on page 19-57.

Port Monitoring Menu

The port monitoring commands are contained on the port monitoring menu, which is a sub-
menu of the Networking menu. The port monitoring menu displays as follows:
The commands in this menu are described in the following sections.
®
file format.
to .
1 MB 8 MB
Port Monitoring
®
, that provides a means for
VLAN
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