The most recent articles from IT Week

NetBotz 420

Dave Bailey — 2004-12-09T17:39:46.000Z

Dave Bailey, IT Week, Thursday 9 December 2004 at 17:39:46

An easy-to-use appliance for monitoring physical conditions

The NetBotz 420 appliance can monitor business-critical assets through various sensors and a CCTV camera. It could, for example, be used to detect extremes of heat and humidity. The 420 is NetBotz's mid-range device, aimed at smaller datacentres and remote offices, although it could also be used to protect rooms containing valuable materials sensitive to temperature and humidity. It comes in two models, a standard 19in, 1U, rack-mountable unit and a wall-mounted version.

We reviewed the latter, which had a single USB 1.1 port, a serial port, an RJ-45 10/100Mbit/s LAN connection, an audio jack, and connections for a Compact Flash card slot that can only be used for 802.11b Wi-Fi, GSM/ SMS wireless modem or PPP modem cards. Unfortunately the LAN connection does not yet support the 802.3af Power over Ethernet standard.

The onboard CCTV camera on our test model supported a resolution of 640x 480 pixels in 24bit colour and a maximum rate of 20 frames per second. The onboard sensor pod fitted to The NetBotz 420 could monitor temperature, humidity and airflow and could pick up audio activity.

We configured the device manually through the serial link on our laptop, although such connections are becoming rarer and perhaps NetBotz ought to consider configuration through the USB port.

After logging-on we set the option to pick up an IP address automatically and gave it a hostname, although the intrinsic hostname was netbotz02A109, the last six figures being the lower half of the NetBotz MAC address. We then installed the local console on a system running Windows 2000 Professional.

We plugged the device into out LAN and it picked up an IP address, after which we were able to browse to the management interface. The 420 can support Internet Explorer version 5.5 or later, Netscape Navigator 4.79, 6.00 or 7.02 and Mozilla 1.3 or later on all Microsoft's currently supported desktop operating systems and NT 4.0, as well as Red Hat Linux 7 or 8 and Solaris 9. The local console automatically picked up our NetBotz 420 and we could see our lab remotely over the IP connection and monitor people via the CCTV camera. The camera has motion sensor software that can be used to trigger email alerts which can contain captured images.

It was simple to configure the system to email us if set temperature or humidity thresholds were exceeded. We also configured the system to send an on-screen alert to our Windows desktop system if other parameters we had set were exceeded. Adding an 802.11b wireless Compact Flash card or a GSM card would allow some redundancy to be built into the system.

We were able to monitor various parameters, such as humidity and temperature, on screen, but not simultaneously, and there was no provision for locally storing camera images. Users requiring this capability would need the larger model, the NetBotz 500, which has local storage.

There is provision for an extra four external sensors - for example for external temperature and humidity sensors - and third-party sensors can also be used.

Contact: NetBotz 0800 389 5101

Price: £1,580 + VAT

Fluke Networks EtherScope

Dave Bailey — 2004-10-29T10:22:44.000Z

Dave Bailey, IT Week, Friday 29 October 2004 at 10:22:44

In the right hands this pricey portable troubleshooter would pay for itself

Launched in October this year, Fluke Networks' EtherScope is a handheld network troubleshooting device aimed at IT staff dealing primarily with network access-layer problems. Costing nearly £4,000 + VAT, the device appears expensive but should repay the outlay, depending on the experience of the network technician using it. However, it lacks wireless functionality, which Fluke said will be available in 2005.

The 1.1kg EtherScope is powered by an Intel XScale PXA255 processor and runs the main Network Assistant application, among others, under an embedded Linux operating system. The sturdy casing features PC Card and Compact Flash slots as well as a serial and USB port and microphone and headphone jacks.

The EtherScope is very easy to use: plug in a cable to the LAN, power on the Etherscope and after verifying the LAN link, it automatically starts to probe the network. The main screen shows which tasks it has completed, which it is working on and any that require continuous monitoring.

The main application running on the EtherScope is the Network Assistant and one of the first things it does is to find out the different IP subnets, NetBios domains and IPX networks. In parallel with this it also finds the nearest switch, the top broadcasters on the network, the devices connected to the network, and identifies if any virtual LANs are present. It also produces a list of the top protocols being used on the network. In tests, when we plugged the EtherScope into one of our test networks, it flagged errors such as duplicate IP addresses and printers configured with bad subnet masks.

The touchscreen, together with the functionality of Fluke's Network Assistant application, makes it easy to drill down and pull out useful information. For instance, we could monitor the nearest switch and then check the utilisation of each of its ports and identify if there were any errors, or we could set up the EtherScope to measure bandwidth and error trends at intervals of 10 seconds, 60 seconds, 10 minutes and 60 minutes.

If there were problems with any network devices or we could not see devices we expected to see, we could launch one of the EtherScope's onboard tools to try to fix this. These tools include Ping, Trace Route, Telnet and a Linux Terminal.

The EtherScope's main application can also be accessed by another user if the technician needs to pass a problem to someone else - for instance to a network engineer. The engineer could connect remotely over the web and access real-time reports or any of the XML-based reports that can be saved to Compact Flash.

One minor shortcoming is that the software button to restart network probing is next to the "back" button. In our tests, it was quite easy to lose all the data we had collected when all we wanted to do was go back to the previous screen.

Price: £3,995 + VAT

Contact: Fluke Networks 01923 281334

Fluke OptiView Series II

Dave Bailey — 2004-07-20T14:22:21.000Z

Dave Bailey, IT Week, Tuesday 20 July 2004 at 14:22:21

A network analyser that is easy to use, but isn't cheap

Launched in June, Fluke's OptiView Series II Integrated Network Analyser is designed to troubleshoot and monitor LANs. The comprehensive options offered with the device allow it to be used to monitor almost any aspect of a company's network infrastructure, including wide area networks (WANs) and wireless LANs (WLANs).

There are three versions, Standard, Pro and Pro Gigabit, priced at £9,563 + VAT, £11,473 + VAT and £15,936 + VAT, respectively. All three support 10Base-T and 100Base-TX networks using an Intel PRO/100 VE adapter.

The Pro model adds support for remote monitoring through RMON and RMON2, together with 100Base-FX fibre interface and packet capture/decode capability. The high-end Pro Gigabit model adds a 1000Base-SX fibre interface using a standard gigabit interface converter (GBIC); and 1000Base-LX or TX GBICs can be ordered as an option.

We tested the Pro Gigabit model, which had 1000Base-SX fibre interface fitted as standard, and found it very easy to use. We could start monitoring our test network within minutes of powering up the system. The touchscreen interface is simple to operate and allows staff to move rapidly between the different views of network traffic and to set up and run network scans.

The Pro Gigabit weighs just over 2kg. It has a 1.1GHz Intel Pentium M processor with 512MB of system memory and a Toshiba MK2023GAS 20GB hard disk. Fluke has upgraded the operating system from Windows 98 to Windows XP Professional. In addition to the network I/O connections there are two USB 2.0 ports and a VGA connection. Fluke quotes a battery life of 45 minutes for the 2Ah lithium-ion battery, but there is a 6Ah external battery, which Fluke says gives an extra 135 minutes.

On startup, the OptiView II displays local network utilisation, network protocol statistics, devices discovered in the broadcast domain, the number of networks found, and any problems discovered.

We were able to use the unit to capture real-time network traffic data online or set up an automated packet capture for analysis later. The packet capture uses a buffer which can be set to a specific size - we set it for 64MB - and can capture all the traffic the device can see.

A filter can also be set up to capture specific types of network traffic, such as User Datagram Protocol (UDP) or Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) traffic.

The packet-capture files are saved on the hard disk and can be viewed offline using Fluke's Protocol Expert module. Protocol Expert can give clear, high-level data views of the network traffic, even at the application layer. If it detects any problems it will give advice on how to fix them.

The Pro Gigabit model comes bundled with Fluke's WAN Vision software for analysing WAN traffic.

The VLAN Vision software module for analysing network traffic from virtual LANs is optional, as is Protocol Expert. Both add considerably to the cost.

Price: Standard model £9,563 + VAT; Pro model £11,473 + VAT; Pro Gigabit model £15,936 + VAT

Contact: Fluke 01923 281 334