10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet/USB Bypass Network Tap

Works well, very useful.

I love this tool, but I have two comments that might help you: (1) The USB3 port is NOT just to power the LANProbe - it is a USB Ethernet adapter which makes using the device on a single development PC really easy. If you don't have USB3 cables laying around, order one suitable for your PC when you order the LANProbe. On my PC, LANProbe shows up on WireShark as "Ethernet 2". You're Welcome. (2) There have been a few occasions where it seems the LANProbe was dropping packets of a certain type (DHCP on one occasion, DNS on another occasion) and cycling power on the LANProbe was the only thing that allowed Wireshark to correctly capture the packets there were obviously being exchanged between my device and the router (i.e. My device was correctly looking up URLs in DNS, but Wireshark showed no DNS packets until I cycled power on the LANProbe). Ethernet devices are complex, so it's not surprising they occasionally need to be rebooted. Even with this caveat, I LOVE the LANProbe!

It works. I needed to diagnose network connectivity for a couple IOT industrial machines. Fed the logs into Wireshark connected to a micro PC for months and that allowed us to diagnose the problem as a vendor/hardware problem. We had allot of finger pointing that it was our network and not the hardware. This allowed us to prove otherwise.

The device works okay, but I had to klept a USB power port and find a matching cable. I don't think I've ever bought an instrument that didn't include a power cable. Apparently, they are expecting you to use the device's integrated NIC and it's USB power? That's often not appropriate - you have to use their "Monitor Using Ethernet Topology", but the supply shown in their diagram isn't included. Pretty chintzy, especially considering the (high) price. Also, as a head's up, it introduces a significant delay when used with GigE, similar to the cut-through time of a switch, so performance measurements with this device inline will not be the same as those when it is inline in some cases.

Once we got it working (sampling / tapping network traffic), this unit has worked without issue but it does (well, did) take a bit of effort to configure the software to handle the generated data and deal with some USB connection / driver issues. Am using a Mac running OSx as the connected computer (at the other end of the USB cable). Overall, considering the device, alone, probably should rate it as 5 stars but taking in consideration of getting it to actually work, I removed one star.

These TAPS have worked flawlessly for us in over 25 locations.

You might not ever find a better solution. Works out of the box, exactly as described.

Device does exactly what's said in the description. Even though I wasn't able to test it with a fully saturated 1Gig link yet I'm already very happy with the performance . Metal case feels premium. When the power to the device is cut the bypass kicks in and connection re-establishes in under a second. Costs for delivery from the US to Germany were about average and delivery itself was super fast. If you are looking for a premium grade and yet affordable network tap look no further.

It was as good as we expected.

Would not pass traffic towards the host with data which is already port mirrored. Will replicate all data to tap port but the very same data won’t reach host. Acts more like a switch. Details about wired behaviour. When sending a test pcap file from one of the Lines and with Wireshark running with one port connected to the receiving port where the traffic is being sent to and Wireshark running on the monitoring port of the tap. They give different values. The monitoring port gets all the traffic being sent, but the receiving port only receives what looks to be LLC frames and nothing else. It's as if the tap when receiving the traffic that is sent from tcpreplay is filtering out any irrelevant traffic. This will be a problem when were the tap is receiving mirrored traffic, it will replicate the traffic on the monitoring port, but the other end of the tap (where the traffic is being sent through) will filter out most of what it is receiving. If it is just regular traffic that is passing through the tap (i.e. actual traffic), this seems to be all replicated fine and passed through the tap properly. It seems that the TAP has a switch chip in it filtering out some data, frames of a certain type, I.e. most frames are dropped. But the monitor port just mirrors what it receives. For comparison The throwing star passive network tap was better at this because it could replicate and pass through all what it is receiving. Updating from 1 to 4 stars seller/vendor support got back with clarifications on limitations for use cases.

I have had this tap for 2 years now and it works great!