Free networking system software for linux

Argus Monitoring System software is a system and network monitoring application.
It will monitor nearly anything you ask it to monitor (TCP + UDP applications, IP connectivity, SNMP OIDS, Programs, Databases, etc).
It presents a nice clean, easy to view web interface that will keep both the managers happy (Red Bad. Green Good.) and the techs happy ("Ah! thats what the problem is").
It can send alerts numerous ways (such as via pager) and can automatically escalate if someone falls asleep.
Main features:
- It is open-source available at no charge.
- It has a clean and intuitive web interface.
- The web pages can easily be understood by non-technical people.
- It can generate graphs of what is going on.
- It can monitor network connectivity (Ping test)
- It can monitor TCP/UDP ports
- It can monitor a wide variety of TCP/UDP applications (HTTP, SMTP, RADIUS, ...)
- It can monitor the output or exit code of a program (Program test)
- It can monitor the content of a web page (such as a shopping cart application)
- It can monitor the authoritativeness of a nameserver
- It can monitor SNMP OIDs (such as BGP status, UPS voltage, room temperature, ...)
- It can monitor the results of SQL queries
- It can monitor itself.
- It can be extended to monitor things that the author didnt think of
- It can notify someone (or many people) when something happens
- It can escalate, and notify someone else, if things dont get fixed.
- It can not alarm for known downtime (maintenance overrides)
- It will summarize and rate-limit multiple notifications to prevent paging-floods.
- It keeps historical statistics, for analysis or SLA verification.
- It scales well and can monitor many, many things.
- It can restrict users to viewing only certain items (user "views")
- It can restrict users access to certain features (access control)
- It can support IPv6.
- It can support SNMPv3.
- It can support l10n for your native language.
- It can support redundant multi-server configurations.
Enhancements:
- This release offers improved performance and scalability, adds support for additional tests, and adds support for failover and redundancy.

The Contiki Operating System is mostly known as an operating system for networked embedded systems. A few years ago, however, Contikis primary claim to fame was its Commodore 64 port.
With the help of JAC64, a Java-based C64 emulator developed by my colleague and fellow Contiki developer Joakim Eriksson, you can now experience the C64 port of Contiki 1.2-devel1 again, directly in your web browser!
Enhancements:
- Contiki now does dynamic run-time loading and linking of standard ELF files.
- Rime, a protocol stack designed for low-power radio communication, has been added.
- Cooja, a Java-based network simulator for Contiki is included.
- The build system has been reworked to allow for easy cross-compiling for many platforms.
- A new port for the Tmote Sky sensor board has been added.

Inferno is a compact operating system designed for building distributed and networked systems on a wide variety of devices and platforms.
Inferno was originally developed at Bell Labs (the research division of Lucent Technologies).
Inferno Operating System is a well-designed, economical operating system particularly suitable for use in networked devices such as advanced telephones, hand-held devices, TV set-top boxes, and many other embedded applications.
Inferno can run in native mode on an embedded system or in emulation mode under many different operating systems. Inferno has many features in common with Plan 9.
Cross-Platform Portability
Inferno can run as a user application on top of an existing operating system or as a stand alone operating system. Most of the popular operating systems and processor architectures are supported:
Host Operating Systems:
- Windows NT/2000/XP
- Irix
- Linux
- MacOS X
- FreeBSD
- Solaris
- Plan 9
Supported Architectures:
- Intel x86 (386 & higher)
- Intel XScale
- IBM PowerPC
- ARM StrongARM (ARM & Thumb)
- Sun SPARC
Inferno also runs as a plug-in under Internet Explorer version 4 and higher. Each Inferno system presents an identical environment to the applications, irrespective of the underlying host OS or architecture, allowing the developer to work with a truly homogeneous environment across multiple different platforms.
Portable Applications
Inferno applications are written in Limbo, a modern, safe, modular, concurrent programming language with C-like syntax. It is more powerful than C but considerably easier to understand and debug than C++ or Java. Limbo code is compiled into architecture independent byte code which is then interpreted (or compiled on the fly) on the target processor. This means that any Inferno application will run identically on all Inferno platforms.
Transparent Resources
Inferno offers complete transparency of resources and data using a simple but powerful namespace system. By representing resources as files and having one standard communication protocol, resources such as data stores, services and external devices can easily be shared between Inferno systems. A resource interface may be imported to the local system and used by the applications without them knowing, or needing to know, whether it is local or remote.
Security
High level security is an important part of the Inferno system. By using one standard protocol for all network communication, security can be focused on one point and provided at a system level. Inferno offers full support for authenticated, encrypted connections using a certificate based user identification scheme and variety of algorithms including:
- IDEA, 56 bit DES, 40, 128 and 256 bit RC4 encryption algorithms
- MD4, MD5 and SHA secure hash algorithms
A Complete Solution
Inferno is not only an operating system, it is also a complete development environment, providing all the tools necessary for creating, testing and debugging the applications that run within it.
- Acme IDE: includes editor, shell, advanced pattern matching tools & more
- Fast Compiler: with full syntax and compile time type checking
- Graphical Debugger: with full stack trace for currently executing threads
- Powerful Shell: with sophisticated scripting capabilities
- UNIX like commands: including bind, grep, gzip, mount, ps, tar, yacc...
Enhancements:
- New licence terms (a `dual licence scheme allowing use as Free Software)
- Styx revision based on 9P2000, and consequent changes to Sys
- Authentication changes
- Improved colour graphics support, including compositing
- Scalable fonts using Freetype
- Revamped Tk implementation
- Window management moved out of Tk to a separate window manager in Limbo
- Limbo: exception handling and fixed-point
- Limbo: other possible changes
- Dis VM changes
- More commands and library modules
- Better network service configuration
- /net/dns served by host and native DNS resolver
- Hosted kernels configured from a parts list as for native kernels
- Signed modules
- Internet Explorer plug-in revised and in source form
- Expanded documentation

KNetworkLED is a KDE system tray app that basically mimics the behaviour of the windows network activity system tray icon.
Main features:
- Docks into KDE system tray.
- Has a configuration dialog from which you can select what network device to monitor (out of the ones you have available)and how often you want to poll that device for activity (100ms to 1000ms).
- Tooltip popup when mouseovering the systemtray icon that displays what device is being monitored and how many TX/RX packets have been transmitted/recieved.
Enhancements:
- Poll Timer was not updating on the fly when user changed it.

Linux Mobile System project (LMS) is a full Linux system whose support is the new USB Flash Memory Drives. The intention is to boot any PC with USB support with our system and therefore we will have every administration and analysis applications that we have selected, so we will not need install it. This way, always we will be able to get our Linux system ready to use in our pocket.
This project arose with the intention to study the Linux system of exhaustive way and simultaneously enjoy with it. The initial idea is to fuse two separated disciplines: the programming and the systems management. So well center our study in the denominated "system programming, as much networking level as at device level (drivers).
Main features:
- To initiate our Linux system from memories flash USB.
- The system will be a selection of common GNU tools in every system: disk diagnosis, memory, hardware, networks monitoring tools, etc.
- LMS Tux
- As far as possible well develop new tools and/or utilities with the objective to study deeply the underlying technology.
- The programming languages used will be C, C++, Python and Perl, without forget the system shell scripts.
- The resources minimization (disk space, memory...) isnt a functional objective of the developments.
LMSs main aim is to achieve a highly specialized distribution of GNU/Linux which can carried through the USB Flash Memory Drives. Once the distribution is ready in the USB device, it can be carried in your own pocket and you can start up any PC x86 with no need to install it directly in the PC.
The LMS system is aimed at the development of specific tasks such as network administration, security analysis of networks, and recovery and repair of host data, as well as all information exchange, which is what makes it different from other portable systems such as "live CDs". The main idea is to carry all the potency of Linux and our tools in our own pockets, ready to be used.

Network Security Toolkit is a bootable ISO live CD and its based on Fedora Core 2.
The toolkit was designed to provide easy access to best-of-breed Open Source Network Security Applications and should run on most x86 platforms.
The main intent of developing this toolkit was to provide the network security administrator with a comprehensive set of Open Source Network Security Tools. The majority of tools published in the article: Top 75 Security Tools by insecure.org are available in the toolkit.
What we find rather fascinating with NST is that we can transform most x86 systems (Pentium II and above) into a system designed for network traffic analysis, intrusion detection, network packet generation, wireless network monitoring, a virtual system service server, or a sophisticated network/host scanner.
This can all be done without disturbing or modifying any underlying sub-system disk. NST can be up and running on a typical x86 notebook in less than a minute by just rebooting with the NST ISO CD. The notebooks hard disk will not be altered in any way.
NST also makes an excellent tool to help one with all sorts of crash recovery troubleshooting scenarios and situations.
Enhancements:
- We are pleased to announce the latest NST release: v1.5.0. This release is based on Fedora Core 5 using the Linux kernel 2.6.18. Here are some of the highlights for this release: the NST Web User Interface (WUI), has been greatly enhanced and cleaned up; extensive additions to managing and analyzing network packet captures; the ability to setup and manage printers; the ability to easily mount many different supported file system types; the ability to manage the NST as a file server (both NFS and CIFS); the addition of the Inprotect package (a Nessus manager); the addition of the Zabbix package (another network resource monitoring tool - similar to Nagios)....

Understanding computer networks without performing practical experiments is really difficult, not to say it is almost impossible. Unfortunately, setting up a networking lab can be very expensive.

Netkit has been conceived as an environment for setting up and performing networking experiments at low cost and with little effort. It allows to "create" several virtual network devices (full-fledged routers, switches, computers, etc.) that can be easily interconnected in order to form a network on a single PC. Networking equipments are virtual but feature many of the characteristics of the real ones, including the configuration interface.

Netkit exploits open source software (mostly licensed under GPL) and is heavily based on the User Mode Linux (UML) variant of the linux kernel. The purpose of this project is to solve many of the difficulties and technicalities that a user could have in using UML for networking. We offer the users an easy-to-use-and-install package, which at the same time implements effective network emulation. Further, we provide a corpus of teaching material that can be used for courses at different levels.