Packet sniffer for IT work

[email68]

I work for a city IT department. I'm mostly a wireless and phone guy, but I'm trying to learn more about the networking side.

I'm in need of a packet sniffer to check stuff on our network. Specifically I'm trying to learn about vlans and I want to experiment with a switch and watch the output with a packet sniffer to see if I can watch the vlan tags.

What kind of software, commercial or otherwise would work on my mac for this?

BTW- I'm the only one in the IT dept with a mac...

 

[Jethryn Freyman]

Wireshark is the best packet sniffer.

Ettercap is a sniffer which is designed to allow ARP spoofing and man in the middle attacks.

Kismet is a 802.11 wireless sniffer used to discover wireless networks and capture data.