NDIS drivers

[tgarvin]

I have a 3com nic in the machine that is running sniffer pro. There are no NDIS drivers for this nic according to 3com. What is the significance of the NDIS driver and will I be able to capture that much without it?


Thanks!

 

[AZeemeri]

The differennce between a Sniffer driver + Sniffer card and a 'normal' driver + card:

Enhanced drivers modify the adapter to provide additional functionality to the card. For example, an enhanced driver may enable you to view additional network data or improve Sniffer Portable 4.7.5 performance by capturing and decoding more traffic on busy networks.
A normal nic's function would be to drop error frames so they wouldn't show up in sniffer. A NAI enhanced card + driver will capture these frames too. Tell me if I'm wrong anyone?....

 

[AlfSutherland]

Hi,
Andre is correct about the use of NAI supported cards/drivers.
Most (if not all) network cards have NDIS drivers. The purpose of NDIS is to provide a common API so that all cards can be accessed by a common programming interface. NDIS is required so that the card can be put into "Promiscous mode". Sniffer requires NDIS v3.0 (+).
All 3Com drivers have NDIS capability. 3Com jointly developed NDIS with Microsoft!!
For more information -

http://www.pcausa.com/resources/ndisfaq.htm#WhatIsNDIS

Alf