Tools

Here are some interesting tools that run on this server, use the buttons to the left to give them a try and the pointers above to browse through this page.

• Bing is a very cool utility to estimate the available bandwidth between two hosts. It does this by sending lots of ICMP messages and by collecting the Round Trip Times (RTT's). I got this one from this great page which features a lot of similar tools like this, including some that estimate the bandwidth along an entire traceroute path. The link over here takes you to a web interface to bing I hacked up by changing a publicly available cgi script for traceroute. It allows you to perform a bandwidth analysis between the last router pair I encounter on the chello internal network, which currently is set to 212.142.32.43, and any router or server (by url or ip) you want it to. Results can be useful be aren't necessarily a good representation of the actual bandwidth of the network path you measure, read the note on the page.

• Netsaint is a very complete opensource network monitoring package for Linux with a nice web interface. Different from most web based network monitors is that this ones works completely interactive. You can generate monthly stats for example or create an up-to-date vrml view of all the monitored hosts, their status and their position in the network!! Basically it monitors the status of a set of hosts and associated services very accurate and gives a warning when problems arise by e-mail, through its web pages or even by sending a message to your pager or cell-phone. It does this by first checking if a service like http (or multiple services) is running on a host and if it does it reports the host and associated service(s) as being okay. If not there are first some other checks performed like repeating the test a couple of times and then pinging with a really long time-out, which is again repeated before actually reporting a host as completely down. Here you can test-drive it running on this machine, get a good impression on how it works and what to do whit it and above all see how bad my ISP, Chello Netherlands, is doing..... 

• Webmon is a 'simple' script to collect the packet loss of a list of web or ip addresses at a custom interval by fpinging them with an amount of data. Besides this you can do a traceroute with Visual Route on all these hosts through the generated web pages, which allows you to determine at exactly which point in the network things go wrong. You can put the packet loss into a webpage but you can also use the MRTG plugin. MRTG is a package which generates png graphics of host performance over time. Recently I choose the MRTG plugin, so the old Webmon page has been replaced by a Webmon-MRTG page. I also installed a second plugin that pings the same set of hosts with an ordinary 64 byte ping, you can access it from the Webmon-MRTG page. I configured the Webmon script to monitor some local (.nl), some European and some international web sites, the most important routers and DNS servers of my ISP, Chello Netherlands, and the DNS root-servers. I configured it to ping with a packet size of 1024 bytes instead of 64 bytes, which is the default value of the ping command (and Netsaint). Because ordinary traffic uses large packets, Windows uses 1500 bytes as the default value, this list gives a better display of current network usage and thereby download speeds. The downside however is that large ping packets easily get dropped down the way because the ping command has a low priority especially with large packet sizes. So 100% packet loss doesn't necessarily mean that the host (or a router in between) is actually down. It does mean that you have a really bad connection with this host and probably have problems connecting with it, the scale of this however is mostly smaller than the packetloss implies. Click on the link to check it out. If a host has 100% packet loss you can always look if it's mentioned in Netsaint here, since that gives a far better presentation of actual downtime since it uses standard pings and other pluggins to verify that a host is actually down.

• Ipac is a nice tool for Linux which can keep track on exactly how much Internet traffic you create and can generate nice web graphics which show your average download and upload speed over time. This one monitors the total traffic that passes through this PC on a weekly basis.

• Dnews is a very good news server for both Unix and Windows. This is its web interface and allows you to take a look at my ISP's newsgroups (chello.nl) and many others. Because there are many local groups, posting is only allowed from chello.nl ip's for now. If you're a chello customer however you can always send me a mail from your chello account and I'll give you full access. 

• SimplePop is a collection of scripts that allow you to send and receive e-mail. You provide it with the POP server of your provider and ofcourse your username and password. This allows you to check your mail without deleting it from anywhere in the world while e-mail is send through the local subsystem on the other hand. This method is relatively safe: no e-mail is collected locally and there is no password database or user settings file either. The POP protocol, which most ISP's use, however is really insecure as it communicates in plain text over the Internet where anyone can listen in...hello I'm john and my password is smith I want to receive my mail, something like that!! So it's really better not to use POP-3 mail at all. But since most providers don't offer a choice in this, there really is lots and lots of traffic like that already on the net and finally there are not that much hackers around, I mean real ones..this is a risk you can take. Check it out here. Got this one from Cgi-resources.com, were you can find a lot more of applications like this one.

• Setiathome, well if you don't know what the hell I'm talking about then go to http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/, I really don't feel like explaining it at least not for now, to much English .    Here you can find a web based monitor for seti running at this computer, sloooooow .

• Sara, definitely the best security scanner out there I ever came across!! Instead of just showing you a boring list of open port numbers that the ones like http://grc.com/ and http://www.dslreports.com/ do, this web based Unix application scans your PC for exploits (or any other host it can reach (even complete subnets!), although I don't encourage this kind of abuse...). And best of all it can also run as a server!! Here you use a modified version of the supplied webscript to perform a sara scan on your host and have the results e-mailed.

• Webmin is, to quote their web site: 'A powerful web-based administration interface for Unix systems.' Using Webmin you can configure DNS, Samba, NFS, local/remote filesystems and more using your web browser. A great tool to remotely manage....well almost every aspect of a Unix system. Besides its buildin configuring modules you can add third party modules, there is a Vnc client(PC Anywhere for Unix, only different) a Ssh client and many, many more. Webmin contains a small webserver with SSL support and cgi applications to do the actual configuration for you. It has many configuration options, including flexible security settings, and is easy to install. Take a look at the Webmin site for more information or if you want to start using this great remote configuration tool. Here you can find the 'Network Utilities' module, which contains a set of interfaces to popular unix utilities like nslookup, traceroute and ping. The nmap interface is disabled however for obvious reasons. Login using user test and password 321. Again for all you would-be hackers: to prevent any missuse of this program all users besides user test, which is only allowed access to the 'Network Utilities'module, are disabled from external ip's...
• Visual Route is a traceroute application for both Windows and Unix. Instead of your standard Windows(or Unix) traceroute program this one is multi threaded, which means that it gets its results simultaneously instead of one by one, and it maps its results to a map of the world by identifying the location of the hosts it finds. So it's fast and graphical and it now comes with a web interface. Visual Route's security does not permit linking from a Macromedia Flash object however, so in this case you'll have to use the form below. Because you need the correct referer addres a second trace directly from the applet itself is also not possible.. Check it out here, but be patient as the java applet loads and wait a moment if you click anywhere in the map to zoom in before clicking again. Or get it yourself at the Visual Route web site

   

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• Downtime is a simple script that does exactly what the title says: logging downtime. The main reason for installing it was to have a more detailed overview of the short periods that my gateway, 62.194.182.1, is down. Netsaint has already showed me a lot of short network outages lately for this router (15 min or so), these don't really show up on the weekly or monthly graphs though so that's where this utility becomes handy. The link over here takes you to a simple script I've written that puts the downtime logfile into a web page.
• Bookmarker is a tool to keep and organize all your bookmarks from various browsers and/or computers in one place, like so many others out there do. This one uses PHP scripts and stores its data in a mySQL database (or other SQL flavor if you prefer). I use bookmarker because it is web based, so no need for local installations...over and over again. There is also no 'friendly' company involved to take care of your bookmarks, all data is send to MY server. So no worries about what exactly happens to the data I send upstream . Oh almost forgot: It looks nice and comes with lots of handy features like importing Netscape's bookmark files. Take a look at my local collection of bookmarks. Lots of work still needs to be done though, but if you look under 'koppelingen' you should find some useful links.
• HAMweather is a collection of perl scripts, image and text files that allow you to start your own online weather station, sort of....you can view forecasts of basically every (large) city in the world from various public weather forecast providers, US users do have more options though . What I like about it and what you won't find in other scripts like this is that it comes with many features and plugins. This allows you to view your forecast online from within a small ticker tape to a full blown html site, all user configurable!!
• The last link leads to my local version of the 'eboa' linemonitor for chello customers, this one monitors 213.46.161.141 which seems to be the gateway to the internet from here lately...this used to be 212.83.64.50 for quite some while though and I really have no idea what it will be next week , but in the meanwhile take a look at how the current main router is doing and yes red is a perfectly normal color over here .

 

 

That's all for now folks, questions? mail me:  

 

           

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© JB 2000