A look at Paessler PRTG

During Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2017 one of the presentations we attended was from Paessler, about their PRTG monitoring tool. I had only seen it once before, during a penetration test I performed at a customer site – and since it was running with default credentials it gave a very nice insight into the IT setup they had. But so far all my monitoring I had setup myself had been via Nagios or Icinga. So after the presentation I wanted to check out PRTG myself and installed a test version. After letting it run for a while I had seen enough to write a blog post about it.

The Network Capture Playbook Part 5 – Network TAP Basics

Most network captures are recorded using SPAN ports, as we’ve seen in the previous part of this series. Now that we know what SPAN is all about, it’s time to find out what TAPs are all about, and why you would want (or need) to use them in network capture. TAP is an acronym for “Test Access Port” – it’s a device you add to the network with the purpose of giving you access to ongoing communication.

The Network Capture Playbook Part 3 – Network cards

One of the most common answers that come to my mind when being asked questions during or after a talk at a conference is the famous phrase “it depends…”. This may sound unsatisfactory at first, but the problem with a lot of questions regarding network analysis (and packet capture) is that there are always so many things to consider. So when we’re talking about using a standard network card like they are built into most PCs and laptops these days, the answer to the question of “is it good enough to capture packets?” is – you probably guessed it already: “it depends”.

Trace File Case Files: SMB2 Performance

We had an interesting question regarding SMB2 performance on the Wireshark Q&A forum recently. Upon request the person asking the question was able to add a couple of trace files (=”capture” files).  The question and a link to the traces can be found here:

https://ask.wireshark.org/questions/55972/slow-writes-even-slower-reads-spanning-wan-to-netapp

Since the question nicely fits into the scope my talk on Sharkfest Europe last week I have asked the attendees to take a look at the question. For the next days the number of views increased significantly. So, here are my 2 cents.