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Portmon – I forgot about you!

Posted on by seanj

Did you ever use a tool all the time and then just forget about it?

Portmon was one such tool for me, of course, seeing as it is useful microsoft retired it.

Here it is:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896644

It won’t work on windows 7 up, and I don’t seem to be the only person bothered by the sidelining of portmon…

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-hardware/portmon-equivalent-for-win-7-64-bit/187c4fe0-2e1c-415b-9c14-3e65f9901fb5?auth=1

This is seriously about the most asinine thing I have read so far this week… and considering the idiocy in the news lately, that’s really saying something.

What possible excuse or reasoning could MS have had for buying up SysInternals and then promptly ending all support for all the good and useful software they made? Why did you actively destroy a company that made products that make your operating system tolerable? What answer could there possibly be for why you chose not to include or update a version of PortMon for Windows 7, unless some other company paid you not to so they could try and sell the same software for 1000x more than what it is reasonably worth?

I have industrial automation and SCADA customers who maintain their own servers, but rely on me to keep our mission-critical software working, where I can’t just be installing freeware or expensive copies of software, even if the software is licensed to my company, and you have made it effectively impossible for me to troubleshoot many of the more common problems that your operating system creates.

So what else is there?

Which is best?

conan-the-barbarian-cc63c37

To crush your bitstreams, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their obfuscators.

Apart from that, my brief assessment is as follows:
RealTerm
In order to use, a donation is required, this only becomes clear after you install it.  It seemed to disable all my USB2.0 ports, not good.
Serial Line Sniffer
It looks like it needs to be compiled?

Copyright (C) 2001 Yan Gurtovoy

slsnif operates by opening a pty and linking it to the serial port.
It takes following parameters / options:

1. Serial port to open (required).
2. Name of the file to direct output to (optional, defaults to stdout).
3. Desired baudrate (optional, defaults to 9600 baud).
4. Timestamp On/Off (optional, defaults to Off).
5. Print ascii values in hex On/Off (optional, defaults to Off)
6. Print number of bytes transmitted On/Off (optional, defaults to Off).
7. Optional colors for timestamp, number of bytes transmitted,
and normal output.
8. Lock port On/Off (optional, defaults to On).
9. Use Unix98 ptys instead of BSD ptys (optional, defaults to BSD style).
10. Second serial port to open. If specified, this port will be used
instead of a pty, thus providing an ability to log data between
two serial ports.
11. Filenames for dumping raw data into, separate files are used for
input (from device) and output (from host) data.

See man page for details on syntax, here are a couple of examples…

Examples:
slsnif /dev/ttyS1
— opens port /

Good luck!

SerialMon
This didn’t work on windows 10.
SerialMon is unable to software monitor you serial communication. Please restart the computer after installing SerialMon or reinstall it.
£50!!  Good grief!!
Device Monitoring Studio
Don’t be fooled by the website, it’s not free (€60 for standard version with no updates)!  However, there is a 14 day trial and it does work.
fdms

Winner

If you’re in a hurry and don’t want to spend, the winner is clearly Device Monitoring Studio because A it works and B there is a free trial.  Finally C, it’s a feature rich com port monitor with a fairly decent GUI.

Addend

Be very careful with this, I spent hours sending messages with NI Max and seeing no response on Device Monitoring Studio.  Don’t know why it happens but it actually works ok when used with LabVIEW.  I suspect that NI Max somehow overrides Device Monitoring Studio.

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