Diary of a Network Geek

Okay, maybe it’s more than a little random…

Here’s the thing, see, I spend a lot of time doing all kinds of weird stuff at the office.  I mean, I almost never have the same kind of day twice.  Really, the most consistent thing I do is go to lunch at more or less the same time every day.  Seriously.
But, along the way, I end up with some strange things in my browser.  All work related, of course, but, still an odd collection.  Here are a few things I found hanging around this week:

First, an article from TechRepublic about monitoring your network with a utility built into most, if not all, Linux distros called “ntop”.  Basically, it runs in the command shell and shows you were the network traffic your Linux machine can see is going.  Obviously, this is most useful if you use Linux for a firewall or gateway machine, since that would let you monitor pretty much all internet traffic.  Also?  Once you start it on that machine, you can get to it remotely via a browser to check the stats.  All for free.  Pretty cool.

Next, there’s another article on TechRepublic about resolving all those mysterious IP addresses into a physical location.  So, when you see that “special someone” trying to crack your home router, you can trace back to pretty close to where ever they are.  And, yes, for those of you who were readers back when I went through my divorce, that’s how I found out my ex-wife and her latest victim were following my blog.

But, if that wasn’t enough, here’s a third article from TechRepublic about a peer network monitoring tool that looks good.  One thing I liked about this was that it didn’t seem to need much special to run it, but it still had what looked like good notification tools.  If anyone has any opinions on it, or any of the other tools I’ve listed, please, feel free to add them into the comments.

And, last, but certainly not least, is a page of free web development tools from Microsoft.  Honestly, I have no idea how good these things are, but, hey, they’re free and they come from Microsoft, so, I figure they’re worth downloading.  I’ll probably never use them myself, but there’s no reason I shouldn’t share them with my readers.

So, yeah, these are all things that have been flying around in my browser at work for the past week or so.  Sometimes it’s great to be a generalist, because I never know what challenge I’ll be asked to meet next, but sometimes, it’s just exhausting!

Anyway, happy Wednesday and enjoy the links!