| Imagine it is 4:00 P.M. and you are sitting at your desk with three books spread
across your lap.You are hard at work trying to figure out why performance on
your company’s file server has dropped sharply over the past eight hours. Of the
200 users in your company, nearly 100 of them have called to complain about
slow connection times and hung sessions.You are highly stressed because one of
the callers today was the CEO.The company’s main file server (a NetWare 5
server) performed without issue for the past year.This box never gave you a
problem.You examine the system monitor, CPU utilization, and cache buffers
and determine that all three are within their normal limits.You even run brandnew
virus updates and signatures on the box, just to be sure.You have now
resorted to cracking open all the reference books you shelved a year ago. Blowing
the dust off them, you dig in, ready for a long night trying to figure out the
source of this dilemma.
What if figuring out this problem were as easy as popping open a laptop and
running an application to look at the connection between your server and the
switch port? What if you saw from your analysis that the network interface card
has a problem because it is old and is now chattering or malfunctioning, which in
turn is inhibiting connections? You might even be surprised to know that
someone on your internal network “could” be sending your server a Ping of
Death or some other type of Denial of Service (DoS) attack. How in the world
could you even figure that out? Quite easily, it turns out—with the Network
Associates Sniffer Pro product, that’s how. |
