How To Sniff The Network

I have written basic descriptions of what packet sniffing and port scanning are and I have plenty of tools available in the Free Packet Sniffers and Free Port Scanners section of the site, but I have never really walked through step-by-step to explain how you would use the tools to accomplish the task. Thankfully, Ron Nutter sheds at least a little light by providing a brief explanation to the question "which is the best way to connect a protocol analyzer to an Ethernet network in order to "sniff" the packets on the wire?" in his Nutter's Help Desk column in Network World magazine: How to sniff a network