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Today I received a rather nifty device, an older-model Passive 10/100 Ethernet Port Aggregator Tap (PA-CU) from NetOptics. This device allows one to monitor both halves of a full-duplex 10/100 network connection at once, with only one capture device, which is rather nifty.
It was delivered quite early this morning by FedEx, and upon opening the box I saw that it was practically new, with the power supply shipping bags still sealed. There was no documentation, but this was easy enough to find online, and only consists of jumpers whose settings are silkscreened on the top of the enclosure.
After trying it out today I decided that it would be good to open it up and see what is inside. As this photo shows it is basically their older PCI aggretator tap repackaged into a rather nice metal housing. This board contains a FPGA, a bunch of SRAM, a PIC, and some currently unidentified (but well heatsinked) processors.
If you’d like to see more photos of the inside of the tap, they are all available here: NetOptics Passive 10/100 Ethernet Port Aggregator Tap.