Navtel 9460 Protocol Analyzer info?

On Apr 11, 2005 10:37 PM, Jay West <jwest at classiccmp.org> wrote: That reminds me of the HP line of protocol analyzers (HP 4951A/B 4952C...) I used to live with one of those, too, when I was doing SNA and Bisync for a living (prior to 1984). I don't know anything about this brand or what it would take to hook this one up to anything but a V.35 connecton (useful in itself), but if anyone is going to do any serious serial hacking, I cannot recommend these sorts of tools strongly enough. They would be perfect for, say, reverse-engineering a poorly documented serial protocol between two devices, or, as we used ours, for verifying that one end or the other is really adhering to the published protocol. The HP line also has a menu-driven programming language that is barely sophisticated to emulate an IBM Mainframe and communications controller (CPU + 37x5) initiating an SNA session through the bind and up to idle RR chatter (1Hz ACKs with sequence counts that fill a channel that isn't actively pumping data). _That_ was incredibly useful for debugging some SNA product issues we had, as we could tweak individual bits of our binds to see empirically what the effects were on our products (we purchased the core code rather than writing it all in-house, so we were often forced to poke it from strange angles to see how it wobbled). These could also be useful for debugging a low-speed connection (well under T1-speeds) between a router and an ISP. They also make good password sniffers ;-) presuming one can wedge in between the VT100 and the host (no, we never really did that at work, but we did show folks how easy it is to do). Lots of fun, but I suppose a modern PC could do just as well, presuming there's an app that's designed to capture and display whatever goes by the serial port. -ethan