George, Amanda said:
> How much does the product cost?
Nothing (other than any costs due to network use when downloading it).
> Where can it be purchased?
I don't know. Given that you can download it for free from
http://www.ethereal.com/, the only reasons I can think of to purchase it
would be
1) if whoever's selling it to you is also selling support (I don't
know if anybody's doing that) and you need some form of guaranteed
support (e.g., a telephone hotline, or an organization with response
time guarantees/service-level agreements/etc., or "somebody to sue",
assuming sellers of support exist and provide those);
2) if people in a decision-making role in your organization don't
trust free software but would, in effect, trust the same software if
they paid money for it (or if there's some other bogus
contractual/etc. reason why you *have* to pay money for it);
3) if whoever's selling it is selling it on some physical medium
(e.g., CD-ROM) and that's easier than downloading it and burning it
yourself.
> Should the application be installed on a server or workstation?
That depends on how you're going to use it.
If you're planning on using it to capture traffic between two machines,
you're more likely to be able to capture that traffic if it's running on
one of the two machines in question, because if you're on a switched
network a third machine might not be able to see the traffic between the
two machines, and if it's point-to-point traffic you might not have any
hardware that could be used to tap the traffic (Ethereal itself doesn't
contain the capture code; the libpcap/WinPcap library that it uses can, in
recent versions, be built to use Endace DAG cards, so those could perhaps
be used in that case).
It might be easier to use it on a workstation rather than a server in that
case, but that's not necessarily the case.
> Is any additional network equipment necessary prior to installing the
software?
A network interface on which libpcap/WinPcap can capture. Ethernet
interfaces should work, and some other ones might. See
http://www.ethereal.com/media.html
for information on the types of network interfaces Ethereal is known to be
able to capture, is known *not* to be able to capture, and might or might
not be able to capture (because nobody's tried it and reported back to
us).
