Network analyzer

kriscamaro68

Does anyone know of a program that can basically monitor the network and pin point if a specific ip address is causing a broadcast storm?

dynamik

http://www.wireshark.org/

I'm not sure if it'll specifically identify a device causing a broadcast storm. Don't broadcast storms occur when switches have multiple/redundant connections to each other, but aren't using something like STP to prevent that? If that's the case, any device could easily trigger a broadcast storm. Are you just worried a machine is generating excessive traffic?

kriscamaro68

Well lately we have had some loopbacks in the network cabling and it takes a while to track down the problem. I am just wondering if there is something out there that can pin point a location and alert me if it happens again.

networker050184

What do you mean by loopbacks in the network?

kriscamaro68

What I mean by loopbacks is somehow we have one end of a cable going into the switch and somehow it is looping the signal back to that switch through another cable. example of this is i take a cat5 and plug it into 2 ports on the same switch its looping the signal back to itself creating a braodcast storm. Now we have enabled spanning tree on the switch but other switches in the buidling dont support spanning tree or storm control. thats why i would like to find a network monitoring tool that can notify me if something like that is happening.

darkerosxx

netMRI:

http://www.netcordia.com/products/index.asp

Ahriakin

If some of your switches don't support STP etc. then it's likely they don't support any reporting that most intelligent net tools could use, you'll need to sniff traffic from the wire in these cases. If you have some old PCs you can use try NTop, it'll translate sniffed traffic into detailed reports that might help...and it's free .