NetScanTools Pro 11.91

Release 11.91 was posted on May 6 (installed) and May 7 (USB patch). It has fixes for Packet Flooder and Ping Scanner plus some improvements to Packet Player and PingTrend.

Packet Flooder. Ok, so over the last few months I had reports of the gauge and graph not working and also the new automatic flood mode not working. All reports were from outside the US. Clue #1 - non English Windows OS. By working with one of these customers I figured out why: performance counters are localized to the user's language. Oops. I was accessing three of them to populate the gauge and graph. I was using the English language names of the counters which did not exist in non-English OS's. So I changed it to access the counters by numerical index, then convert that index to the localized name and access the counter I needed by interface name. These are the same counters used in Performance Monitor and Task Manager (pdh.lib for you programmers).

Other fixes were minor but important and a new feature called 'Run Action' was added. This allows the normal run until stop is pressed and also allows a new timed mode where you specify how many seconds you want it to run.

Ping Scanner. The problem here was two-fold. If you scanned a range of IPs outside your subnet and had Do Local ARP Scan checked, it took a long time. And it could be a very long time. The software appeared to hang even though it was not hanging up. The 'SendArp' API function tries to send the ARP packet even though the target is not local - I consider that a flaw. That was fixed by making sure the target is local. The other problem was the Do SMB/NBNS - it would be very slow if your own IP address was in the IP range. Again, easily fixed by skipping your own IP.

Packet Player (found by going to Packet Generator and clicking the button in the lower right) has a new feature that repeats sending the packet stream indefinitely until Stop is pressed. However, note that the Stop button can only be polled after the current packet capture stream is sent. It also automatically loads the last selected packet capture stream into the display grid on startup.

PingTrend has a new checkbox for setting the DF (don't fragment) flag in the IP header. If you do that, be careful because if your data section size exceeds the MTU less the headers, nothing will be sent. I also increased the accuracy of the reported time between packets.

How to get 11.91. If you have an active maintenance plan you can download the 11.91 full installer or USB patch by clicking on Help menu/Check for New Version and following the instructions.

The maintenance plan is currently discounted. Click on Help menu/Maintenance Plan Renewal to see the new pricing.

Packet Flooder on Windows 8

A comment about using NetScanTools Pro v11 Packet Flooder on Windows 8. The default settings will only get you about 40% saturation on Win 8 32 or 64 bit. Our recent tests on 8-64 show that if you change the Data Payload Length to Fixed and select the MTU (usually 1460) or slightly below, you can get 95% saturation. Microsoft has changed some of the way the network layer operates since Windows 7.

Looking for a Packet Flooder?

Check out the video on youtube after you read this post.

We have noticed that many people looking at our Packet Generator got there because they were looking for a 'Traffic Generator' or a 'Packet Flooder' - but found that the Packet Generator is really not capable of filling an interface up to the bandwidth they want. They now have their wish. And it works with IPv4 or IPv6.

NetScanTools Pro v11.10 (not released yet) has a new tool called 'Packet Flooder'. It can generate UDP packets at a very fast rate using multithreading. The packet payload can be either random numbers or alphabetical 'abcdefg' etc. The payload length can be random or fixed. The target port can be random or fixed.

Another new thing you may notice is the bandwidth gauge and historical chart. You are going to see more of these in future versions. The gauge shows the real time bandwidth utilization and the historical chart shows it over time.

Enjoy!