Will a switch monitor port still function as a standard port?

[Worthy]

Morning guys,

Just a quick one. We have an office in Melbourne and their traffic usage is through the roof every month and we need to find out why. I've configured a port on the switch (HP Procurve) there to mirror all the traffic on the uplink port and now I need to ask the I.T guy over there to plug the server into this port so I can find out where the traffic is coming from. Will the monitor port still allow access to the network / internet or does it function purely as a mirror port and no other traffic is allowed? We run quite a lot off stuff on there including Hyper-V and I don't want the guys there to plug it in, assume it works and then go home for the night.

Cheers

 

[bigredshark]

I actually don't know, I've always given it a dedicated port, but why not just plug in a second port? Every server going these days has dual NICs (or more)

 

[Worthy]

The other one is plugged into the phone system. Long story

 

[bigredshark]

Well the best I can offer is I believe it can be done on a Cisco but I don't know about a procurve, either way, if you're running anything of importance on there it seems like a fairly bad idea...

 

[Arthalen]

Yep, can be done - recently did this to watch SIP/RTSP traffic going to ipbx box From a server with wireshark. Switch in question was a 3500 yl ProCurve PoE switch.