NetBoy 2.0 consists of three separate network utilities: PacketBoy, EtherBoy, and WebBoy. Each is a specialized application for collecting packet, Ethernet, and HTTP information, respectively. All three applications are easy to use but lack the overall appeal and comprehensive features found in EtherPeek (which actually costs less).
PacketBoy provides start-and-stop style packet sniffing: You must cease capturing before you can view the packet data that was collected. It decodes quite a few protocols, including IP, TCP, and UDP. It also supports application layer protocols like KALI and Quake, letting you uncover software, such as games, that may be hogging your network bandwidth.
The packet data view contains all the pertinent information but is plain and unappealing: No colors or logical separations exist among the different types of packets. Trigger options include wake on traffic volume or on encountering a certain type of protocol. We had problems getting the triggers to work, though, even when setting one to begin capturing on any network traffic. This turned out to be fairly typical of the product: We discovered a variety of minor bugs and missing features.
EtherBoy reports network statistics, graphically displaying network nodes along with their interconnections and protocols. Colored links represent the various protocolsa wonderful idea but poorly executed. The navigation and controls are awkward. There's a minirepresentation of the full node view at the lower right of the page. To zoom in, you must drag a square around it in the mini-view. Also, you can change various qualities of the node view by means of sliding bars for options; this, too, is often inaccurate. Addresses and links flash on and off the screen in dynamic reporting mode, and the lime-green ICMP links are indistinguishable from the chartreuse NetBIOS links, especially among the dozens of other colored links.
General reporting is sparse, with one huge downside: Our reports displayed addresses exclusively from within our intranet. EtherBoy doesn't include sites beyond the Internet gateway in its reports. If you were to connect to www.pcmag.com, for example, while using EtherBoy to monitor traffic, the records would register only traffic between the user's computer and the LAN's gateway, without logging the site address.
The Alarms function, which parallels the triggers, is extensive and reliable. You can create alarms based on host/link traffic, network use, or protocol types. Alarms can be set to play a WAV file or execute an EXE file. For example, you could set an alarm to notify IT via e-mail or a pager.
WebBoy is an almost identical replica of EtherBoy, but for Web traffic. WebBoy, however, has one key feature that EtherBoy should have: online HTML report publishing like that in EtherPeek. WebBoy creates reports chiefly on URL activity for both LANs and WANs, but it does contain a couple of general Internet traffic reports, such as connection histories by host and by protocol distribution.