For all of you out there who have used an iPad or an Android tablet you’ll be loving the finger-friendliness of the operating system.  People such as myself, using Windows 7 on a tablet are at a disadvantage.  Even Windows 7′s touch interface looks good though when you compare it to the average websites we visit.  This is because, small as they are, the buttons in Windows are still larger and easier to press than links or buttons on almost all websites.

The difference for iPad and Android users, who have extremely touch-friendly interfaces, will be even more pronounced when they start navigating around websites.  You can zoom in and out of websites using multi-touch, I can do this in IE9 too on the ExoPC, but why do we want to be constantly zooming into, out of and around websites when instead we should be just using websites that work?

The problem as it stands is that while the overall market for tablets and smartphones in Internet usage is growing exponentially, it’s still extremely small compared to the usage figures seen on desktop computer systems such as PCs, Macs and even GNU/Linux systems.

Then there are the development costs incurred by businesses in making their websites touch friendly.  You can almost immediately discount drop down menus, multi-choice options of any kind in fact become problematic.  Text links, which still make up 90%+ of website navigation controls, are the biggest culprit, being placed too close together and too close to other clickable items to be of any use for touch control.

There is absolutely no sign yet though that web developers are looking to update these websites to make them ready for the boost in touch access that will occur in the next few years.  Instead we see the main websites including Amazon, eBay, Gmail, Twitter and Facebook all putting their money into mobile apps.  There has been a huge flurry of activity here in the last year with all the main platforms having apps developed for them at significant expense.

This makes sense to a certain degree as apps can be faster than websites and the user interfaces can be far friendlier.  These apps are now able to do things that the traditional websites have never been able to achieve.

Now though the current crop of Browsers, which will be complete with the formal release of Internet Explorer 9 tomorrow, all support HTML5 which allows for much greater flexibility and control over websites, and which also enables websites to look and behave far more like the apps that have followed them.

While it’s an easy sell though for companies to devote time and money to platforms such as iOS, Android and Windows Phone for app development, which in the grand scheme of things have user figures in the low 10′s of percent of overall web users, redeveloping their websites to support HTML5 when few people have the latest browsers is a much harder proposition to accept.

This is because when you develop an app, you will know that every single person who owns that platform will be able to access it even if that number is relatively small, say just a few million.  With three billion people online around the world though and with regular visitor numbers in the hundreds of millions for the big websites, it’s an expensive gamble to spend time currently developing an HTML5 version of your website that will support touch, or even multi-touch, knowing that this will only be seen or used by around 1 or 2% of your overall user base.

This gives people using the iPad and Android devices a significant advantage over Windows tablet, PC or Mac users.  If the rumours of a multi-touch Mac this year are true this will compound the issue even more.

This all leads me to wonder if the future of the web doesn’t lie in the websites themselves but rather in software, that is more powerful, more flexible and more visible to users.  We could instead find that while existing websites are maintained, any future updates will be merely include finger-friendly links to appropriate apps.

The advantages here are that apps are more secure, provide better functionality and with an app store already available for the Mac and one due next year for Windows, everywhere.  From a marketing standpoint an app also gives you a permanent advert, via an icon, on the user’s screen.  This is something that websites currently can’t do (we can discount IE9′s ability to pin apps to the Windows 7 taskbar as something that will be used by small numbers of users only).

So while companies will still have to maintain back-end web systems, we could find that the future of the web is in front-end apps rather than the websites themselves.  I would say this is a good future and one to welcome.  It will be interesting to see which way the big companies decide to jump.

With the help of the GNOME Nettools you can have a sweet collection of powerful tools that will help you to troubleshoot your network in no time. And this collection of tools is all wrapped up into a user-friendly graphical interface. So without any further adieu, let’s take a look at this powerful suite of tools.

Features

The GNOME Nettools includes the following tools:

• Devices: Have all information about your networking devices at your fingertips.
• Ping: Get detailed information using the ping tool.
• Netstat: Get detailed information about your routing table, active network services, and multicast information about your machine.
• Traceroute: Trace the path to a network host.
• Port scan: Scan for open ports on servers and desktops.
• Lookup: Get detailed information about a server.
• Finger: Lookup a users finger entry.
• Whois: Lookup a whois entry for a domain.

GNOME Nettools also features:

• Copy information to text report.
• Help system.
• Drop downs for previously entered addresses/domains.
• Easy to use GUI.

Now let’s take a look and see how this tool is used.

Usage

Figure 1

As you can see there has been no mention of installation. That is because GNOME Nettools is installed by default. In order to start up the tool you only have to go to the Administration sub-menu of the System menu. Once you have fired up the tool you will be greeted with main window at the Devices tab. This tab is where you gather the information about your installed networking devices. As you can see (In Figure 1) there is plenty of detailed information about my default eth0 interface. You can switch this to display information about any connected internet device you have on the machine by using the Interface drop-down.

The next tab, Ping, is where you can actually start troubleshooting networking issues. Ping is almost always one of the first tools I use, but I generally use it in command line form. Since most new Linux users prefer to not use the command line – you can still get your ping on with Nettools. Click on the Ping tab to reveal how the Ping tool works (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

By default the Nettools Ping tool will be configured for a limited 5 requests. You can up that number or even change it to an unlimited number if you need. In Figure 2 I have sent 5 ping requests to an internal server and received 100% sucess on my packets. I know this server is at least responding.

The other tools will all work exactly as you would expect them. One thing that is nice is as a tool is working you can switch over to another tool without disrupting the original tools task. This is especially nice when running a traceroute that can take a while (see Figure 3).

Figure 3

The traceroute tool will follow a path, hop for hop, to a destination you enter. In Figure 3 I ran a traceroute on www.google.com which ended before it reached its goal. This, of course, was only to show you the output of the traceroute (as there is not much I can personally do if my route to www.google.com is stopped outside of the boundaries of my network or my service providers network. But it gives you an idea of where the route stops. If this were a corporate issue, and the destination was one I had to reach, I would know precisely where the last known successful hop was (in the case of Figure 3 – after the 65.222.158.82 address).

I can then use the Whois tool to discover who is connected to that address. By clicking on the Whois tab and then entering the IP address above I receive the following information:

MCI Communications Services, Inc. d/b/a Verizon Business UUNET65 (NET-65-192-0-0-1)
65.192.0.0 - 65.223.255.255
SPLICE COMMUNICATIONS, INC. UU-65-222-158-80-D4 (NET-65-222-158-80-1)
65.222.158.80 - 65.222.158.87

If www.google.com were a critical address for me (and my company) to reach for work (or a host of my company’s web site) I could at least contact the owner of this domain.

Final thoughts

As you would expect, the rest of the Nettools tools work in a very similar fashion than their command line counter parts. The only difference? You don’t have to open up a terminal window to use them. No commands to remember, no commands to type. Just easy network analysis, with the help of a user-friendly GUI tool.

finger USERNAME

Where USERNAME is the real user name of the user.

When issued this command would report all of the information the user had set. In most educational institutions you could find out where your instructors office was or what that instructors office hours where – just about any information that user decided to share.

The finger command is still useful. Even on a single-user system (which seems strange to me that a Linux system would only have one user) finger can offer the user login information, shell information, home directory, etc.

When you finger a user you will see information like this:

[jlwallen ~]$ finger jlwallen
Login: jlwallen Name: jackie leigh wallen Directory: /home/jlwallen Shell: /bin/bash
Office: 1212
On since Sun Apr 5 08:06 (EDT) on tty1 26 minutes 54 seconds idle
(messages off)
On since Sun Apr 5 08:52 (EDT) on tty4 1 hour 15 minutes idle
(messages off)
No mail.
Project:
linux.com
techrepublic.com
ghacks.net
Now for those multi-user systems where the users will want to set their finger “plan”, how is it done? Simple. Let’s take a look.

Via Command

There is a simple way to edit your finger information – using the chfn command. The structure of this command looks like this:

chfn OPTIONS

Where OPTIONS is a list of the possible options to use. The options available are:

-f: Full Name (if you need spaces put the full name in quotes)

-r: Office number

-w: Office phone number

-h: Home phone number

That’s pretty much all of the information you can edit with chfn. So if I want to edit my finger plan to reflect a change in office and office phone number I would issue the command:

chfn -r NEW_OFFICE_NUMBER -w NEW_OFFICE_PHONE

Where NEW_OFFICE_NUMBER and NEW_OFFICE_PHONE were the actual numbers for the change. Now when anyone fingers my username they will see that new information.

The ~/.plan, ~/.project, and ~/.pgpkey files

These files allows you to add much more to your finger information. When a user fingers you the information will be displayed in the order .pgpkey, .project, and finally .plan. Here’s what they can do.

~/.plan – This file is pretty much a catch-all where you can add whatever information you want to add. This is a good place for office hours, class or work schedule, etc.

~/.project – This file contains the projects you are currently working on.

~/.pgpkey – This is your pgpkey.

Naturally you might not want to include all of the above in your finger information. That is the beauty of these files, you can include what you want and leave out what you don’t want. I will warn you that including your pgpkey is both a securty issue and takes up a lot of space in the terminal window.

Final Thoughts

You may think finger and plan are too out of date to have any uses. But what about using a Linux server that is administered by multiple people? This is a situation where finger can be used to know who has been logged on, what they have been or are currently working on, etc.

Like all of Linux, there is a beauty in finding interesting solutions for problems. With the finger command you might find a solution to a problem that has eluded you for a while. Give it a try, you might find this tool useful.