The Sniffer and other tools like it are meant to drink from a fire hose.
So, is it far fetched to analyze a dozen or more OC-12's other than from a
router?? No. In fact carriers should embrace a different approach to
further understand and analyze their backbone. Analyzers' with filters of
attack/virus definitions can play a key role in fast, efficient response in
the fight against distributed attacks.
Should the sales people trying to peddle their wares learn a bit about
underlying technologies and be forced to take Algebra 101 before be let lose
on NANOG?
So your SONET sniffer decodes STS->[other
stuff]->IP->[other-stuff]->app-layer and matches against definitions that
you have, and does it all in real-time, does not fall over due to load,
deals with fragmentation and assymetic routing and so on. Oh, and then of
course it does it all in a secure manner since the traffic should not be
exposed to 3rd parties.
Yeah, right.
Alex