Magenta Systems Internet Packet Monitoring Components v1.1 (ID #24420)

Magenta Systems Ltd

The Internet Packet Monitoring Components are a set of Delphi components designed to capture and monitor internet packets using either raw sockets or the WinPcap device driver. Hardware permitting, ethernet packets may be captured and interpreted, and statistics maintained about the traffic.

Uses of packet monitoring include totalling internet traffic by IP address and service, monitoring external or internal IP addresses and services accessed, network diagnostics, and many other applications. The component includes two demonstration applications, one that displays raw packets, the other that totals internet traffic. The components include various filters to reduce the number of packets that need to be processed, by allowing specific IP addresses to be ignored, LAN mask to ignore local traffic, and ignore non-IP traffic such as ARP.

The components capture packets using two different techniques, with differing benefits and features:

1 - Raw sockets which are available with Windows 2000 and later. This uses WSocket from the François Piette internet component suite, from http://www.overbyte.be/. Major benefit is that no other software needs to be installed, but raw sockets don't seem to work fully with some network adaptors, and ignore non-IP protocols. Some adaptors may capture received packets, but ignore anything sent.

2 - WinPcap (Windows Packet Library) device driver, needs to be installed (it installs two small DLLs and a driver),but captures all packets including non-IP. WinPcap may be downloaded from http://www.winpcap.org/, and version 3.1 is included in this package. Note the Delphi WinPcap pcap.pas and packet32.pas modules were originally written by Lars Peter Christiansen, but have several bug fixes and many new features. In theory WinPcap will run on Windows 9x, but it's not been tested. Use of the latest WinPcap version 3.1 5th August 2005 is strongly recommended, but the component also supports WinPcap 3.0 10 February 2003.

Magenta Systems Internet Packet Monitoring Components v1.1 home page