Nipper, the opensource Security Audit Tool that can perform Securiy Audits of Network Device Configurations is now integrated into ZipTie, a Network Inventory and Configuration Management framework. Nipper in Ziptie will be called as Zipper.
Tag: IP Tools
ARPing – Ping using Address Resolution Protocol(ARP)
ARPing is an utility that can be used to ping using ARP requests instead of using ICMP as used in standard Ping utility.
Because it involves ARP, arping is limited to the local network to which the server or the interface (if more than one interface) is connected to. ARPing can be quite useful to
- Check if an IP Address is already in use before assigning to another device
- Duplicate address detection
- Update neighbors ARP cache
Network Device Change Control (NDCC)
NDCC is a system of monitoring and recording changes to configurations of network equipment. It can store configuration snapshots for any text-based configs. It has been used to store configurations from Unix and Linux systems; Cisco routers, switches, load balancers, and firewalls; Foundry; NetScreen, Juniper, NetScaler, and others.
Fping for Windows
Fping is a free console program, much like the ping program that comes with windows.
Why use fping instead of the standard windows ping?
fping – Ping multiple hotsts at once
fping is a ping like program which uses the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request to determine if a host is up. fping is different from ping in that you can specify any number of hosts on the command line, or specify a file containing the lists of hosts to ping.
SmokePing – Latency Measurement Tool
SmokePing is a deluxe latency measurement tool. It can measure, store and display latency, latency distribution and packet loss. SmokePing uses RRDtool to maintain a longterm data-store and to draw pretty graphs, giving up to the minute information on the state of each network connection.
Main Features of SmokePing are,
- Measures latency as well as latency variation
- Wide variety of probes, ranging from simple ping to web requests and custom protocols
- Advanced alarm system, triggering on configurable 'latency patterns'
- Master/slave deployment model to run measurments from multiple sources in parallel
- Ajax based graph navigation
- Chart mode, to show the most interesting graphs first.
- Plug-able probes, alarms (matchers) and charting function.
- Written in perl for easy enhancability.
- Fully documented.
- Commandline option
How SmokePing Works
SmokePing sends test packets out to the net and measures the amount of time they need to travel from one place to the other and back.
For every round of measurement smokeping sends several packets. It then sorts the different round trip times and selects the median, (ie. the middle value). This means when there are 10 time values, value number 5 is selected and drawn. The other values are drawn as successively lighter shades of gray in the background (smoke).Sometimes a test packet is sent out but never returns. This is called packet-loss. The color of the median line changes according to the number of packets lost.
All this information together gives an indication of network health. For example, packet loss is something which should not happen at all. It can mean that a device in the middle of the link is overloaded or a router configuration somewhere is wrong.
Heavy fluctuation of the RTT (round trip time) values also indicate that the network is overloaded. This shows on the graph as smoke; the more smoke, the more fluctuation.
Smokeping is not limited to testing just the roundtrip time of the packets. It can also perform some task at the remote end ("probe"), like download a webpage. This will give a combined 'picture' of webserver availability and network health.
For more information click here
SmokePing can be downloaded from here
There is an online demo for SmokePing here
Netcps – Free utility to measure end to end TCP/IP performance
NetCPS is a free tiny utility which can be used to measure effective performance for TCP/IP network. Run NetCPS in server mode on one machine and query using NetCPS from another machine to measure performance.
To run in server mode, Start "netcps -s" on one machine, and from another machine run netcps as netcps IP ADDRESS (ex: netcps 192.168.0.1) on the other machine, and the two programs will pump 100 MB of data over the network. The CPS is measured with 1/1000 second's accuracy.
Note that winsock seems to take quite some CPU resources on high-speed connections. The author explains that he got ~4 MB/s max on a Intel Pentium 133, and ~7 MB/s on an AMD K6 200, using a Intel Intel Pro 200 server with NT 4.0 Server as the other host. He got a report that two Pentium 200 servers running NT 4.0 server had 10 MB/s on a direct connection (server to server, no hub or switch).
Netcps use a normal TCP/IP connection, pumping data without any disk access.
The author Jarle Aase says Netcps was something he wrote in a hurry. He wrote it during a troubleshooting session with some cisco switches that seemed to have problems with 100 MBits connections. It should be useful for testing networks, and the performance of hubs, switches and routers. The program is targeted towards needs of testing performance, and has no fancy features. The program should however be useful for network professionals. It's quite small and easy to use.
Netcps is freeware. You can use it, and the source code, to whatever purpose you want – with one small restriction: Governmental and military use is NOT permitted.
Part of the source code is borrowed from the sample code at www.sockets.com
For download the utility itself and the source code, click here