AW: [bf1942] Resource consumption

Scratch Monkey ScratchMonkey at SewingWitch.com
Fri Jan 24 20:48:26 EST 2003


--On Friday, January 24, 2003 11:45 AM +0100 "Daniel E. Atencio Psille"
<dea at atencio.de> wrote:

> ... But be careful using ntop, because ntop switches the NIC you're
> monitoring into promiscuous mode which can lead to "unwanted misbehaviour"

Promiscuous means it listens for packets not addressed to it. Normally
intended for sniffer software that spies on packets going to other
machines. But note that this doesn't do much if you're connected to a
switch (as our host is), as the switch doesn't send you any packets not
addressed to you. (This is a feature of switches, to reduce the load on the
hosts connected to it. But switch management software can tell a "managed"
switch (more expensive) to send all packets to a port, so you can let your
sniffer listen to all the packets going through the switch. Only the switch
admin can do this.)

So promiscuous mode means nothing to the average host in a data center
today. It's only useful if you also control the smart switches in the
network.



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