mjhammel@Kepler.dell.com (Michael J. Hammel) (04/19/91)
We are interested in finding test tools that can generate network traffic as
well as monitoring it. I've looked at Excelan's LANalyzer and it looks
pretty much like what we need but I'd like to get as much info on various
products before making a decision. I'd like comments from the net on the
following products (vendors are welcome to reply as well). I'll post a
summary if I get enough requests to do so.
I'm looking for products with the following characteristics:
Works over ethernet, IEEE802.3, Toke Ring (IEEE802.5), ARCNet
Handles following protocols:
TCP
UDP
IP
Netware (and all that entails)
PC Lan
X.25
SNA stack (including 3270 and 5250 support)
Banyan Vines (and whatever that entails)
NFS
X Windows R3 and R4
SNMP
should probably deal with FDDI, but I don't know much about that
yet and I don't know to what extent we might get into it in the future.
Needs to be easily upgradeable to new protocols and transmission media.
Should be able to run in non-proprietary hardware platform (ie vendor sells
the network card and software to plug into one of our 486 systems, etc)
Can *generate* traffic as well as monitor it (this is *very* important).
The more ways this can be done (build some script with remote station
addresses to "bang" against for example) the better.
I need unit costs, upgrade costs, support costs, etc, as well.
Products:
Network General Sniffer
Hewlett Packard 4279A
Hewlett Packard Network Advisor Series 386 (HP4980A)
FTP Software LANWatch
Cabletron Systems LAN Specialist
Communications Machinery LANScan
Frederick Engineering Feline
Tektronix TC2000
ExperDATA E20 and S100
Spider Systems SpiderMonitor, SpiderAnalyzer, SpiderProbe
Wandel & Golterman DA-30
All information, comments, etc will be most appreciated.
Michael J. Hammel | mjhammel@{Kepler|socrates|feynman}.dell.com
Dell Computer Corp. | {73377.3467|76424.3024}@compuserve.com
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