Free networking tools software for linux

Network Time Tools (NTT) is a set of network tools designed to provide monitoring of a network and the services on that network, and provide various reports on the hosts/services and optional alerts via email, pager, and cellphones. It also has the capability to send messages on user-specified services to email, pagers and cell phones.
Main features:
- Bandwidth measurement based on time intervals
- Checks Service availibilty on specified Hosts for the following protocols:
- ftp
- ssh
- telnet
- dns
- http ( specific pages )
- www ( simple head )
- pop
- nntp
- imap
- irc
- smtp
- Ability to send alerts based on user specified services to:
- pagers
- cell phones
- email
- A frontend that displays a daily report that can be viewed by a web browser or cell phone.
- views specific servers
- views specific services
- views bandwidth measurements
- view alerts
- Data stored in a Mysql Database
- Easily configurable via an XML config file
- Runs in Daemon or one-shot mode

Pinger Network Tools is a simple frontend for ping, netstat, traceroute and whois.

My first ever Kommander script that I did in an effort to learn the Kommander scripting engine/style and to have something useful.

Built with Kommander Editor 1.2

Network Query Tool is a one-stop solution for obtaining information about a domain name or an IP address.
Instead of manually using a variety of shell commands, or visiting numerous websites to investigate a host, just load Network Query Tool in your browser and enter the hostname or IP. NQT does the rest, as is evidenced by this sample output.
Main features:
- Reverse lookup - resolves an IP address to a hostname (if one exists) or vice versa
- DNS query - aka Dig, requires a dig binary on your system
- Whois (WWW) - gets domain registration information. Now supporting just about every known TLD, gTLD, and ccTLD.
- Whois (IP) - gets IP owner information. Supports all IP blocks maintained by ARIN (US), RIPE (Europe), JPNIC (Japan), APNIC (China/Asia-Pacific), BRNIC (Brazil), LACNIC (Latin America), AFRINIC (Africa), and KRNIC (Korea).
- Check port - Determine whether or not a port on the target host is open. Defaults to port 80.
- Ping - performs a 5-packet ping to the target, requires a ping binary.
- Traceroute - performs a traceroute to the target, requires a traceroute binary.

802.11b Network Discovery Tools is a gtk tool to scan for 802.11b networks using wavelan/aironet hardware and Linux wireless extensions. It includes the ability to log coordinates of found networks from a GPS device that is NMEA-compatible, and can be linked to a serial port.

It currently logs the WAP MAC to a database, along with the frequency the AP uses and link quality info. aside from that, you can also connect a Garmin GPS receiver and snarf that data. Im just using GPS::Garmin, which currently doesnt support NMEA, and i didnt feel like writing another NMEA library, so maybe ill do that later. for now, youll have to
have your GPS receiver sending data in GRMN/GRMN.

To install the program, you should just have to run "make install" as root.

Just run perlskan, or /usr/local/bin/perlskan *** AS ROOT ***

ive included a small perl program called "catdb" thatll just print the contents of the database in very hard-to-read format.

To examine the db further, you can either write a program to use the PSkan::DB module to examine the database (very simple, its just a Tie::Hash module). to iterate through the database, all you have to do is:

tie(%foo, PSkan::DB);
while(($key, $data) = each %foo) {
...
}
untie(%foo);

it doesnt get much easier.

Network Simulator (Ns) is a discrete event simulator targeted at networking research. Ns provides substantial support for simulation of TCP, routing, and multicast protocols over wired and wireless (local and satellite) networks.
Ns began as a variant of the REAL network simulator in 1989 and has evolved substantially over the past few years. In 1995 ns development was supported by DARPA through the VINT project at LBL, Xerox PARC, UCB, and USC/ISI.
Currently ns development is support through DARPA with SAMAN and through NSF with CONSER, both in collaboration with other researchers including ACIRI. Ns has always included substantal contributions from other researchers, including wireless code from the UCB Daedelus and CMU Monarch projects and Sun Microsystems.
Enhancements:
- Major updates were made to the PackMime-HTTP HTTP/1.1 and WPAN modules.
- Solaris/Sun C compilation bugs were fixed.

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.

The Linux Wireless Extension and the Wireless Tools are an Open Source project sponsored by Hewlett Packard (through my contribution) since 1996, and build with the contribution of many Linux users all over the world.

The Wireless Extension (WE) is a generic API allowing a driver to expose to the user space configuration and statistics specific to common Wireless LANs. The beauty of it is that a single set of tool can support all the variations of Wireless LANs, regardless of their type (as long as the driver support Wireless Extension).

Another advantage is these parameters may be changed on the fly without restarting the driver (or Linux).

The Wireless Tools (WT) is a set of tools allowing to manipulate the Wireless Extensions. They use a textual interface and are rather crude, but aim to support the full Wireless Extension. There are many other tools you can use with Wireless Extensions, however Wireless Tools is the reference implementation.

iwconfig manipulate the basic wireless parameters
iwlist allow to initiate scanning and list frequencies, bit-rates, encryption keys...
iwspy allow to get per node link quality
iwpriv allow to manipulate the Wireless Extensions specific to a driver (private)
ifrename allow to name interfaces based on various static criteria

Most Linux distributions also have integrated Wireless Extensions support in their networking initialisation scripts, for easier boot-time configuration of wireless interfaces. They also include Wireless Tools as part of their standard packages.
Wireless configuration can also be done using the Hotplug scripts and distribution specific support, this enable the proper support of any removable wireless interface (Pcmcia, CardBus, USB...).

Any versions of the Pcmcia package offer the possibility to do wireless configuration of Pcmcia and Cardbus card through thefile wireless.opts. This allow to fully integrate wireless settings in the Pcmcia scheme mechansism. However, this method is now deprecated in favor of distribution specific methods.

Please note that the Wireless Tools (starting with version 19) supports fully IEEE 802.11 parameters and devices, support older style of devices and most proprietary protocols, and are prepared to handle HiperLan as well. More recent versions of course adds more 802.11 support.

But, unfortunately not all drivers support all these features...