Colasoft Blog

Colasoft Capsa Network Analyzer was selected as No.6  in the Security Scanner Software category of the WindowSecurity.com Readers’ Choice Awards.

“Our Readers’ Choice Awards give visitors to our site the opportunity to vote for the products they view as the very best in their respective category,” said Sean Buttigieg, WindowSecurity.com manager. “WindowSecurity.com users are specialists in their field who encounter various network security solutions at the workplace. The award serves as a mark of excellence, providing the ultimate recognition from peers within the industry.”

WindowSecurity.comconducts monthly polls to discover which product is preferred by Network Security administrators in a particular category of third party network security solutions. The awards draw a huge response per category and are based entirely on the visitors’ votes. WindowSecurity.com visitors can submit their votes for the current Readers’ Award poll in the site’s left-hand bar.

If you’d like to know who the Readers’ Choice winners were, please take a look at Winner in the Security Scanner Software Category of Readers’ Choice Awards.

About WindowSecurity.com

WindowSecurity.com (http://WindowSecurity.com) is a Microsoft Windows Security resource site. It is the leading Windows Security site, attracting over 450,000 Security administrators and specialists a month. The site provides the latest Windows Security Services, articles and tutorials by leading Windows Security experts, message boards, software listings and product reviews.

Migrating configuration files on the same machine

The following steps will allow you to migrate configuration files from an nChronos Evaluation to an nChronos Licensed version on the same machine.

1. When uninstalling nChronos Evaluation program please click “Yes” when following box pops up:
2. Install the nChronos Licensed version. By clicking this uninstall “Save” action all configurations and captured data files will be saved automatically.

Migrating configuration files to a different machine

Follow the following steps if you installed the nChronos Evaluation version on one machine and now want to migrate the files to an nChronos Licensed version on a different machine,

1. Export the configurations from nChronos Evaluation. Login to the nChronos Server web portal then go to the Server Management page and click Export Config button to save the configurations:
2. Install and activate the new licensed version of nChronos. Login to the nChronos Server web portal, go to the Server Management page, and click the Import Config button to import the saved file in step 1.
3. After the import is complete the nChronos service will automatically restart. After the restart, the configuration files will now be migrated.

In this Thanksgiving season, Colasoft would like to thank you all for your continued support and trust.

We are very proud that nearly half a million users are now using Colasoft products as their network troubleshooting tools.

We would like every one of you to have that same opportunity this November from Colasoft.

Just pick the opportunity that best meets your needs.

What’ s new in Capsa 7.8

Capsa 7.8 provides a VoIP analysis module to capture and analyze VoIP calls and graphically display VoIP analysis results, which helps IT staff baseline and troubleshoot VoIP-based networks.

A VoIP view is provided to list all VoIP calls as well as their related statistics and has a lower pane for analyzing voice and video control flows and media flows as well as their jitter, loss, MOS, etc., to visualize analysis data and assess voice and video quality.

A VoIP Explorer groups private and public IP addresses for VoIP calls.

Furthermore, there are VoIP diagnosis events and VoIP logs. A VoIP dashboard contains the VoIP analysis charts graphically.

Together with VoIP Explorer and VoIP diagnosis, the VoIP view helps users visualize analysis data and assess voice and video quality, to thereby assist you troubleshooting VoIP networks, software and hardware.

Top Domain Name Statistics

Earlier versions of Capsa provide a Name Table feature to help network administrators conveniently manage staff’s network activities by displaying the IP address as names instead of figures. Capsa 7.8 here now provides a top domain feature which shows top visited Internet IP addresses as domain names. We know that one domain name may be resolved to be multiple IP addresses, and Capsa can identify all these IP addresses as one domain name if they are actually directed to that domain, and graphically display the top resolved domain names:

Port – Based Statistics

A Port view is provided to present traffic statistics based on TCP/UDP port numbers. This feature is useful when you want to analyze a specific application. The port numbers are provided with above layer protocol, packets, bytes, average packet size, and common application.

In addition, the Dashboard view provides a Port panel to graphically display top port statistics:

Learn more

August 20, 2014– Colasoft, an Oklahoma company, is a leading provider of innovative, affordable, network analysis software solutions. Colasoft today announced the release of its latest Capsa Network Analyzer, version 7.8, a real-time portable network analyzer for wired and wireless network monitoring, bandwidth analysis, and intrusion detection.

In addition to Bandwidth Monitoring and Traffic Analysis, Capsa Enterprise has added full support for VoIP communication analysis. Capsa customers can now, not only monitor VoIP calls, but also drill into a vast collection of call statistics detailing their jitter, loss, and MOS. The new VoIP Explorer and VoIP Diagnostic views allow users to visualize the VoIP data as Capsa visually displays the voice and video quality, assisting users in troubleshooting VoIP networks, software and hardware.

Colasoft has also added a new detailed Port Analysis view to their Capsa Enterprise packet capture application. This new Port Analysis view is quite useful in the analysis of application management issues to determine where the problem actually originates.

In addition to VoIP, Colasoft has added a new “Top Domain Name” view of the network traffic. Colasoft users can now view the traffic utilization by Domain Name in addition to IP Address. Additionally, this new release of Capsa Enterprise has added full support of IMAP4 to the hundreds of already supported protocols. A Free Trial version is available for download at: http://www.colasoft.com/download/products/download_capsa.php

With the increasing number of companies being hacked, Colasoft has seen a dramatic increase in the interest of its Capsa and nChronos products. As noted by Brian K. Smith, Vice President at Colasoft LLC, “Capsa is the only Packet Sniffer and Packet Decoder to provide an easy to use GUI combined with CyberAttack Detection features that were previously found only in more expensive Intrusion Detection Applications. Colasoft Capsa now offers the Network Engineer one of the most robust Bandwidth and Packet Analysis tools available.”

With the release of Capsa 7.8 there is now added support for protocols like: IMAP4, SIP, SDP, MEGACO/H.248, MGCP, Q.931, SAP, H.225, RMI, Oracle, MMS, GOOSE, SMV, and GMRP. Capsa also added several new VoIP protocols. Capsa inherently analyzes VoIP issues, like voice quality QOS, dropped packets and connectivity issues.

Capsa 7.8 is compatible with Windows XP/2003/2008/Vista/Windows 7/Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. A trial version is available for download at: http://www.colasoft.com/download/products/download_capsa.php

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Capsa Professional and Capsa Enterprise packet capture application provides the ability feature to backup configurations, including analysis profile settings and network profile settings.

To migrate configuration files from a Capsa Demo version to Capsa licensed version you should:

1. On the Start Page, click the menu button, go to Configurations Backup, and click Export to save the configurations as a file:

2. Uninstall the Capsa Demo version and install the Capsa licensed version.

3. From the new Capsa licensed version go to the Start Page, click the menu button, select Configurations Backup, finally click Import to import the saved file in step 1.

4. After the import, Capsa will restart automatically. Your configuration data is now migrated.

From: colasoft.com

Migrating configuration files on the same machine

The following steps will allow you to migrate configuration files from an nChronos Evaluation to an nChronos Licensed version on the same machine.

1. When uninstalling nChronos Evaluation program please click “Yes” when following box pops up:
2. Install the nChronos Licensed version. By clicking this uninstall “Save” action all configurations and captured data files will be saved automatically.

Migrating configuration files to a different machine

Follow the following steps if you installed the nChronos Evaluation version on one machine and now want to migrate the files to an nChronos Licensed version on a different machine,

1. Export the configurations from nChronos Evaluation. Login to the nChronos Server web portal then go to the Server Management page and click Export Config button to save the configurations:
2. Install and activate the new licensed version of nChronos. Login to the nChronos Server web portal, go to the Server Management page, and click the Import Config button to import the saved file in step 1.
3. After the import is complete the nChronos service will automatically restart. After the restart, the configuration files will now be migrated.

source: colasoft.com

When data is transmitting over computer network, one or more packets may fail to reach their destinations, and this is packet loss.

Packet loss can be caused by multiple factors including network congestion, the performance or policy of networking devices, and networking hardware faults.

To test the packet loss rate, you can use Colasoft Ping Tool:

To monitor network packet loss to thereby monitor the quality of the network, you can use Colasoft Capsa.

There is a Diagnosis view on Capsa.

1. If you have a diagnosis event of TCP Retransmission, it means there is maybe packet loss on the network (according to the transmission policy based on TCP/IP protocols, the packet will be retransmitted if it is lost).

   

2. Then, double-click the event on the Details pane:

   

3. A window pops up to show the decoding information. According to the Sequence number and the Acknowledge number, it is determined that there is packet loss on the network.

   

Packet loss is not always a bad thing. It depends on the type of data being sent. For example, when a text document is transmitted, it is unacceptable to drop a single packet. But, for VoIP (Voice over IP) traffic, it is acceptable to drop one or two packets every now and then.

source: www.colasoft.com

As an innovative and high quality network analysis solution, Capsa network analyzer is not only designed to monitor and analyze wired network traffic, but also for wireless LAN traffic, including 802.11 a/b/g/n networks.

The Enterprise Edition of Capsa network analyzer provides you the capability of wireless network capturing and encrypted wireless data decoding. No matter which encryption type an AP uses, all WEP, WPA and even the hardest WPA2 wireless traffic can be decrypted with the pre-specified security key. Additionally you do not have to figure out the encryption type of an AP, Capsa identifies and matches the encryption type of keys automatically.

We all know that users have to connect to an AP (Access Point) in order to access wireless network; users must have a wireless network adapter in order to access a wireless AP. Therefore, to capture wireless traffic, we use Capsa to monitor a wireless network adapter.

Please follow steps below to monitor and capture the traffic of wireless network.

1. On the Start Page, choose a wireless network adapter. Once a wireless network adapter is enabled, Capsa automatically detects and displays all available APs.

2. Choose an AP that you want to monitor, and if the AP is encrypted, enter the password for it. Once an encrypted AP is enabled, a dialog box pops up to let you enter the key. If the dialog box doesn’t pop up, just double-click the AP to open the box.

3. Click Start to start monitoring; or if you want to set up alarms, capture filters, packet auto-saving, choose a proper network profile and a proper analysis profile and then click Start to start monitoring

• Once a wireless network adapter is used for capturing packets, it cannot be used for accessing the network anymore.
• If you enter the wrong key for an AP, the analysis project will run as well but it will not decode any packets.
• One analysis project can monitor multiple APs at a time, but the APs must be at the same channel.

 To decode and analyze wireless traffic, you are recommended to:

• Make sure the password for monitored AP is correct.
• Be close enough to the wireless router (signal source) to thereby capture all packets.
• Monitor the AP before other hosts access the network to thereby capture EAPOL handshake packets.

from www.colasoft.com