Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!convex!killer!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!JESSICA.STANFORD.EDU!morgan
From: morgan@JESSICA.STANFORD.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk
Subject: Re: AppleTalk analyzer...
Message-ID: 
Date: 26 Sep 88 17:26:36 GMT
References: <4912@saturn.ucsc.edu>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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Mark Frost writes:

> Is there some sort of analyzer for AppleTalk? 

Yes, but ...  The only existing proper AppleTalk analyzer is the
Sniffer from Network General, which is an Ethernet- (or token ring-)
attached DOS machine (various flavors of portables) with separately
available modules for decoding a wide variety of protocol stacks,
including TCP/IP, XNS, ISO, and most recently AppleTalk (I'm not sure
if you can buy the AppleTalk module yet, but it's "announced").  It
can analyze both EtherTalk and UDP-encapsulated AppleTalk (as used by
KIP and K-Star and CAP).  Alas, it connects at the moment only to
Ethernet, not LocalTalk.  Even more alas, it will run you $20K or so.
It's certainly a blot on Apple and its networking community that the
only decent AppleTalk analyzer is on a DOS machine.

On the other hand, you can probably make some progress on your problem
using a little program called "Peek" that simply collects and displays
LocalTalk packets.  You have to do all the packet analysis by hand,
but you wanted to learn AppleTalk anyway, didn't you?  I'm not sure of
the status of Peek.  I believe it first appeared as part of a
developer's support package from Apple in 1985.  I'm not sure if Apple
expects it to be handed about, or if it's available from APDA, or
what.

 - RL "Bob" Morgan
   Networking Systems
   Stanford