It is interesting but as time goes by, products get better and it gets harder and harder to find simple/not perfect products. But sometimes, not perfect is what one needs to do the job. That is the case when you want to listen with a computer to the network traffic from a different computer.
Traditionally there used to be hubs, little boxes with, say, 4 ports, where whatever you connected to one port went to all other ports (basically like shorting the wires). Nevertheless, that was cluttering the network (no reason to send to a cable something that is not for that computer). Switches started to appear (and were much more expensive) where they would only route between ports those packets that were directed to whatever was hanging from that port. And with time, now, it is basically the only thing you can buy. To get a hub is really tough these days. One can check eBay or for instance this
So, I wanted to monitor the packets going in and out from one computer with a different one, but the ports on my wireless router were not passing the packets from the source computer port to the "spy" computer port (because obviously were not addressed to it). So, given that hubs are hard to find, bought a Netgear GS105E which is a switch that has "port mirroring" function.
Note: careful, a splitter (like this one) will not work either.
