This is a minor advantage in my eyes, but it may be helpful nonetheless, e.g. The utility can also be used to capture packets directly, writing either PCAP, PCAPng or ERF files.īy using USB3, the network card in the capture laptop is not blocked, so you can stay connected to the network if you need to while capturing without interfering with the capture process. More interesting are the capture options you can set, which I’ll explain in greater detail later in this post. While I don’t care about most of the status displays they may help at one point or another, but I could live without them. The ProfiShark 1G comes with a USB utility that allows seeing the status and configuring the TAP in an easy way. In all my tests the TAP did not drop a single frame, no matter how much load I put on the link. USB3 has a total throughput of up to 5 GBit/s, so it has no trouble transporting the combined 2GBit/s of a fully utilized duplex Gigabit link to the analyzer without dropping frames due to overload, which an aggregation TAP normally can’t achieve over a single RJ45 connector. This is pretty useful when you’re using a laptop and don’t have additional power sockets available (and boy, do we all have been in that kind of situation at customer sites) The USB3 port powers the TAP without the need of an additional power source during the capture, so you don’t need to find a power socket for an additional power supply. The new driver installer version 1.0.7 will do this automatically while the one I had (1.0.6) didn’t yet. The ProfiShark 1G appears as a capture card in Wireshark/tshark/dumpcap as soon as you installed the ProfiShark driver and restarted the NPF driver to have it detect the new device (either by rebooting or doing a “net stop npf” and “net start npf”). There are also a few minor disadvantages, if you want to call them that. While this may seem odd it has a couple of advantages (as long as the PC has a USB3 port, which should be pretty common by now). Other than all the TAPs I own it is unique in the way it transports the network frames to the PC, because instead of RJ54 based network cards it uses a USB3 connection. The ProfiShark 1G is a pretty small and portable aggregation TAP, which means that it combines receive and transmit (RX/TX) of a link into a single stream of packets which is then captured by the analyzer. In the end, the nice people at Comcraft offered to send me a sample to see how it performed, and I am always happy to get my hands on interesting capture solutions to see how they perform. I had used 100Mbit USB2 ProfiTap devices before and had some issues with it on Linux, so I was a bit skeptical towards the new ProfiShark 1G as well. ![]() A while ago I wrote a post for LoveMyTool about how I managed to power my Garland Gigabit TAP with a USB cable, which got me into a discussion about the ProfiTap USB3 device on Linkedin.
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