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Packet Sniffer for Network Monitoring Packet sniffer has a special role to play in network monitoring. It is essential to have a little insight into it. Packet Sniffer, also known as a network analyzer or a protocol analyzer, or for certain specific kind of network as Ethernet Sniffer or Wireless Sniffer is a Computer Hardware or software which can intercept and prepare a log of traffic that passes through a digital network or through a specific part of the network. As the data flows in packets through the network, the sniffer catches each packet and analyses and decodes it in accordance with the appropriate RFC or any other specification. In a LAN broadcast system which is wired and uses hub, anyone can capture the traffic or certain parts of traffic using a single machine in the network. Using ARP spoofing, traffic of other systems on the network which are connected using switches can be monitored. For the Network Monitoring, it is preferable to analyze all the data packets present in the LAN by the use of the network switch which also has a monitoring port, whose sole use is to create an image of all the packets which pass through any port in the switch. Thus, in a switch, a shadow port should also be present if the administrator wants to capture the data. In case of Wireless LAN, the administrator can capture the traffic on some specific channel. On the wireless LANs and Wired Broadcast, for capturing the traffic which is neither unicast traffic which is sent to the machine with sniffer software, nor multicast traffic which is send to multiple receivers or a group, nor a broadcast traffic, the Network Adaptor must be set into promiscuous mode. Only some sniffers can support this mode, while most of them don’t support it. In case of Wireless LANs, for receiving all the packets, Adaptor must be put into Monitor mode as in case of Promiscuous Mode, the packets which are not intended for the service set will usually be ignored. Owing to their versatility, packet sniffers can be used in multiple purposes like Analysis of Network Problems, detection of Intrusion Attempts, Network Monitoring, Information of Network Intrusion, Gathering and Reporting the statistics of the network, Suspect content from the network traffic, spying on other users in the network and collecting the information like their passwords, reversing the engineer protocols which are in use in the network, debugging Client to Server Communications and debugging protocol implementations in the network.