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Ten Useful and Free Networking Tools

Article is provided courtesy of Cisco Press.
Date: Oct 13, 2009.

Article Information

1. NetStumbler: To Find Nearby Networks
2. Network Magic: For an Easier Networking Experience
3. DD-WRT: To Super Charge Your Cheap Wireless Router
4. Wireshark (Previously Ethereal): To See the Raw Traffic
5. TeamViewer: For Remote Desktopping
6. NetSetMan: To Manage Your Network Settings
7. LogMeIn Hamachi: To Create a Secure VPN
8. Gbridge: To Securely Share Among Friends
9. Hotspot Shield: To Secure Your Wi-Fi in Public
10. Undelete: So Network Shares Can Use the Recycle Bin

Article Description

Eric Geier, author of Wi-Fi Hotspots: Setting Up Public Wireless Internet Access, shares 10 free networking tools and utilities. From stumblers to help you detect nearby networks, sniffers to see the data, and replacement firmware projects to supercharge your network, you ought to find at least some of some of the tools discussed here useful for your situation.

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4. Wireshark (Previously Ethereal): To See the Raw Traffic

Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer that captures, inspects, and displays the raw traffic of many networking protocols.

It runs on just about any platform: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and many others. It has an easy-to-use GUI and a TTY-mode.

You can use this tool to help understand what's really happening when you're trying to troubleshoot problems on the network. You can browse, search, and filter through the traffic.

If you don't understand the protocols that well, it gives you a chance to familiarize yourself.

Wireshark can also save packet traces for later inspection; open standard formats from other analyzers; and can be exported to XML, PostScript, CSV, or plain text.

In addition, capturing Ethernet and wireless traffic, Wireshark can read from USB, Bluetooth, Token Ring, ATM, and more.

If you use any encryption, such as WEP, WPA, WPA2, Ipsec, or SSL/TLS, you can configure Wireshark with the keys so it can decrypt and display the actual data if needed.

5. 5. TeamViewer: For Remote Desktopping | Next Section Previous Section

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