Context Peek is a Firefox add-on that streamlines the process by displaying the information in a small popup next to the select word or phrase on the page.

The add-on is very versatile, as it allows you to configure your own services in addition to the default services it ships with. The three look-up services it ships with are Wikipedia, the Free Dictionary and Google Translate.

Lets take a look at how it works first before taking a look at the configuration of new services.

All you need to do to use the add-on is to select a word, phrase or sentence first. You then right-click the selection and select Context Peek > Service from the context menu.

The add-on opens the information provided by the selected service in a popup which auto-closes when you click outside the popup window.

To configure existing services and add new ones, you select Context Peek > Configure from the menu.

Configuration is a little bit tricky as you need to have a target url at hand to add new services. You can basically add any server that uses parameters in the url. Lets take Amazon for an example. To begin with you need to perform a search on Amazon. I suggest you search for TEST which makes identification in the url easier.

You then take the target url

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=TEST&x=6&y=15

and replace TEST with the variable used by Context Peek which is CPTEXT so that your target url for Amazon would look like the following:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=CPTEXT&x=6&y=15

All that is left now is to enter a title that appears in the context menu to add the new option to the available services.

Context Peek’s configuration can be a bit tricky. It could however be well worth the troubles as it provides an elegant way of looking up information on the Internet without having to open a secondary tab or browser window to do so.

Firefox users can install the add-on from the official Mozilla add-on repository. The add-on itself requires no browser restart. Changes to the configuration on the other hand do.

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.