I had the oppurtunity to test the full version of NetResident, a network content monitoring and parental control solution for Network Administrators and home users.

If you have used Netmon or Ethereal, you will realize how difficult and challenging it is to follow, analyze and understand the raw data packets captured in a network trace. NetResident solves the problem for you by automatically trying to reconstruct the stream of packets in a trace and display it in a presentable format to the end user.

NetResident captures, stores, analyzes, and reconstructs network trace packets for the following types of protocols:

FTP
Web
ICQ/AIM
IRC
Mail
MSN
News (NNTP)
Telnet
VOIP
Jabber
Yahoo

I installed this software in a corporate network to test it was pleased with the performance.

The installation was very simple and upon the installation of the software, a Step by Step Wizard popped up to walk through the configuration of settings.

To avoid potential problems in the future, keeping in mind that not so tech savvy people may use the product, the first thing the Wizard does is to create a rule in Windows Firewall to allow TCP port 4201 (on which NetResident listens)

Then the service is installed and started on the local computer after which you need to select the network adapter to listen to.

After that, you can select the computers you want to monitor in the network based on IP address, IP address range or MAC address.

NetResident has an inbuilt PromiSwitch Tool which can redirect packets sent from other computers on the network destined for the gateway to your computer through special network packets.

Note: This is highly illegal unless you are the Network Admin of your company. Using this tool may disrupt network connectivity and Tamos does not provide any technical support for this tool.

After the configuration is completed, the service starts capturing any data flowing through the selected network card(s) and dipslays the information in the following format:

Date, Protocol, Source and Destination IP address and Port and description of the content. For example, upon recieving email, the description column will show POP3:Recieved from:email address. Or if it is a web request, it will display the URL of every website visited

If you highlight the description, a preview pane will display the content of the protocol be it an email, MSN messenger chat or FTP session.

And since the software installs a Virtual driver on the NIC card of your computer, the software doesn’t even need to be running to record captures.

You can also connect to the NetResident service on another computer to monitor logs in real time.

All captures are stored in a Database which displays information based on Year, Month, Day and Protocols and can be easilty manipulated. For every field such as Year, Day or Protocol, the total number of records are shown. You can then choose to export and import the records stored in the database for use on another computer or delete them permanently.

NetResident is available for Windows 2000, 2003, XP and Vista, 32-bit and 64-bit Editions.

Visit NetResident homepage here.

A trial version of the software can be downloaded here