Not Seeing Traffic I Know Is There

I have a home network of three machines connected hard-wire to a WRT54G router. Two machines are XPs and the other is Server 2003. Colasoft is installed on an XP and the software is pretty much in a default installation configuration - I have a couple of entries in the address table. When I start up the Colasoft software it seems to be working fine but then when I start IE on the server - and it accesses the Internet just fine - I do not see any of that activity in the packet display. None of this activity is wireless and I am assuming that the router hard-wire ports act the same as a network switch - so why don't I see all activity on my home network ??

 

Hi Billy,

Simply connect Capsa to your router is not enough. You should read this article to learn that we should configure port mirroring to make your Capsa see all traffic on your network: http://www.colasoft.com/support/installation.php.

 

Thank you - its obvious I need to read a little about my WRT54G. I am not sure it qualifies as a switching hub and looking at the topologies shown in Colasoft's installation guideline, the WRT54G seems to qualify as both the router and the hub. Anyway let me do a little more research and I will get back.

 

Well I tried to get some help from Linksys but they gave me the old 'out of warranty' pass off and I couldn't find out whether the ports of the WRT54G V4 with firmware v4.21.1 had port mirroring or not. I have been all through the router configuration/management screens and I don't see anything that references this topic or 'spanning' - somewhere I read that spanning and mirroring were close to synonomous - and I am kind of out in the cold. I guess my next step will be to daisy chain a plain jane hub off of a single WRT54G port and hardwire my machines into the hub - does that sound like a reasonable diagnostic step ?? Also if anyone out there could just tell me what Linksys didn't want to take the time to - are the ports of the WRT54G mirrored or out ??