Fluke Networks OptiView Series III Integrated Network Analyzer

eWEEK Labs analyst Cameron Sturdevant uses the Fluke Networks OptiView Series III to triangulate an access point in our downtown San Francisco offices.

Having located an access point in the ninth floor conference room, eWEEK Labs’ Cameron Sturdevant uses the Fluke Networks OptiView Series III to gather information about the device including MAC (media access control) address and traffic statistics.

Our OptiView worked in one of two modes, wired or wireless. This screen, and the several following, walks through the wired interface. Here we see that the OptiView is connected to a switched network that contains, all told, one router, one switch, two se

As we moved along, tab by tab, we were able to drill down into the protocols of the traffic on our network. New in this version, OptiView was able to dig further into IP traffic to identify on this statistics page the amount and type of application traffi

Here we see a table version of the pie chart seen on the previous slide. During the observation we saw 656 packets of flash traffic.

The Top HTTP hosts by packets sent is a useful report. We see 192.168.2.1, our DNS server, singled out as a server on this screen.

HTTP conversation statistics between systems are neatly presented. We were able to quickly get these same statistics by simply selecting TCP, TCP-OTHER and all of the other branches on the tree structure.

The OptiView Series III can track IPv6, but in this test we looked only at the amount and type of IPv4 traffic. In our case we had a preponderance of UDP traffic.

Here we’ve selected UDP and asked the OptiView to give us a breakdown of the traffic by type. The majority of traffic is NetBIOS traffic.

We tracked the amount and distribution of UDP traffic on our test network.

The discovery tab arranges the devices, networks and problems found by the OptiView. The device automatically reconfigures every time it is connected to a network so the discovery information is up-to-date.

The OptiView found one IP subnet with three hosts on our test network. Other tests showed that the OptiView fully discovered networks that contained as many as 260 devices in well under 10 minutes. Notice that OptiView doesn’t make assumptions about n

We flooded our switch with file transfer traffic. Here we’re downloading Ubuntu and CentOS distros to boost our traffic.

The OptiView Series III operates in either wired or in an optional wireless configuration. The interface is similar in both modes. Here we are seeing all of the wireless access points that are visible from the ninth floor lab.

Looking at the left side of the screen, we tracked the signal strength and security posture of the wireless networks we could see. The key at the bottom reveals that only one of the networks we could see had strong security. Several are open and most use

Here we see a wealth of information neatly laid out for us. Wireless devices are grouped into infrastructure, ad hoc and unassociated groups. At the top of the list is an entry for a 3Com access point that is operating in infrastructure mode but is not br

The top talkers in our wireless network were identified, along with the number of packets and (in this case, the low) utilization level.

Nice touch. We’ve been on several wireless survey missions where we had to manually record the access points we discovered. The OptiView makes it a one-click process to record the device details of all wireless devices seen in an area including signal str

Finally, the OptiView constantly checks wireless channels for signal strength and device presence. The dynamic updates along with audible cues make it easy to use the device in the field.