Portable SmartSniff

This is the portable counterpart of SmartSniff - a very small application developed to capture TCP/IP packets in order to monitor traffic. It includes just a few intuitive and useful options to please enthusiastic computer users.

Since installation is not a prerequisite, you can drop the program files to any location on the disk and click the executable to run.

It is also possible to save SmartSniff to a USB flash disk or similar storage device, enabling you to run it on any computer without previous installers.

It's important to keep in mind that the Windows registry does not get updated with new entries, and extra files are not created on the HDD without the user's approval.

The interface is not particularly attractive but easy to navigate. To start TCP/IP packet monitoring, it is required to select the capture method (e.g. raw sockets in Windows 2000 and XP, WinPcap packet capture driver, network monitor driver), along with the network adapter.

Many details are shown regarding the packets, such as protocol type, remote address, local and remote port, service name, packets, data and total size, duration, local and remote IP address, together with local and remote IP country. Additional data is revealed when selecting an entry from the list.

It is possible to generate an HTML report with selected or all TCP/IP streams, save the packet summaries to file (TXT, HTML, XML, CSV), save the configuration for further projects, extract HTTP files, as well as use a search function when dealing with large amounts of data.

The tool sports several configuration parameters. For example, you can change the display mode (e.g. ASCII, hex dump, URL list) and protocol (TCP, UDP, ICMP), show the capture time in the list, create an icon in the system tray area for quick access, and so on.

The simple-to-use program runs on a barely noticeable amount of CPU and RAM, thus it does not hog system resources. We have not come across any issues in our evaluation, as it did not hang, crash or pop up error dialogs.

To sum it up, SmartSniff provides a highly intuitive environment and resourceful features for anyone looking to capture TCP/IP streams and monitor network traffic.