Throwing Star LAN Tap Pro

I have used numerous expensive taps but wanted something that would be easy to carry around for those spontaneous times when you simply want to monitor traffic on the wire. Low cost, very small and it works really well. I have today used it to diagnose an issue with WOL and within minutes issue was resolved. Using two feeds into WireShark is easy. High recommend this very simple but effective product

Great

Works well. It's poorly labelled, could do with something on the front to tell you which tap corresponds to which input. As the description says, this is 10/100Mbit only, and it worked fine for me at 100Mbit. You need two free network ports to use this. I used this tap with a StarTech dual-port USB3 network adapter https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00D8XTOD0/ to capture the traffic to a laptop, using the Wireshark software.

The tap is very simple to use: just put it in-line with the traffic to be sniffed and take a output to a device to capture the packets. As clearly set out, this tap will run at 10mbps or 100mbps, not 1gbps. The sniffing interface on my capturing device, however, would not recognise the connection at layer 2 unless set to 10mpbs. This caused issues when the in-line devices negotiated 100mpbs. There was no simple way to fix this.