Thursday, September 24, 2009

SmartSniff v1.51 - Freeware TCP/IP Packet Sniffer

Description

SmartSniff is a network monitoring utility that allows you to capture TCP/IP packets that pass through your network adapter, and view the captured data as sequence of conversations between clients and servers. You can view the TCP/IP conversations in Ascii mode (for text-based protocols, like HTTP, SMTP, POP3 and FTP.) or as hex dump. (for non-text base protocols, like DNS)
SmartSniff provides 3 methods for capturing TCP/IP packets :
  1. Raw Sockets (Only for Windows 2000/XP or greater): Allows you to capture TCP/IP packets on your network without installing a capture driver. This method has some limitations and problems.
  2. WinPcap Capture Driver: Allows you to capture TCP/IP packets on all Windows operating systems. (Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista) In order to use it, you have to download and install WinPcap Capture Driver from this Web site. (WinPcap is a free open-source capture driver.)
    This method is generally the preferred way to capture TCP/IP packets with SmartSniff, and it works better than the Raw Sockets method.
  3. Microsoft Network Monitor Driver (Only for Windows 2000/XP/2003): Microsoft provides a free capture driver under Windows 2000/XP/2003 that can be used by SmartSniff, but this driver is not installed by default, and you have to manually install it, by using one of the following options:
    Notice:If WinPcap is installed on your system, and you want to use the Microsoft Network Monitor Driver method, it's recommended to run SmartSniff with /NoCapDriver, because the Microsoft Network Monitor Driver may not work properly when WinPcap is loaded too.


System Requirements

SmartSniff can capture TCP/IP packets on any 32-bit Windows operating system (Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP) as long as WinPcap capture driver is installed and works properly with your network adapter.
Under Windows 2000/XP (or greater), SmartSniff also allows you to capture TCP/IP packets without installing any capture driver, by using 'Raw Sockets' method. However, this capture method has some limitations and problems:
  • Outgoing UDP and ICMP packets are not captured.
  • On Windows XP SP1 outgoing packets are not captured at all - Thanks to Microsoft's bug that appeared in SP1 update...
    This bug was fixed on SP2 update, but under Vista, Microsoft returned back the outgoing packets bug of XP/SP1.
  • On Windows Vista with SP1, only UDP packets are captured. TCP packets are not captured at all.

0 comments: