Other tabs of interest include the Connections tab that is displaying all open connections including the remote IP address, the local port and the program that is using that connection. There is also an option to display UDP listeners, remote computer names and internal connections.

The traffic tab will display traffic statistics of each network adapter in realtime including incoming and outgoing bytes, errors and load. The four last tabs display detailed IP, TCP, UDP and ICMP stats. These are excellent for in depth information about the computer network but usually not that useful to most users.

The information can be copied to the Windows clipboard or saved to disk in a text file. Users who are interested in an excellent lan monitor can find additional information and downloads at the website of the developer of the program.

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Three Network Monitor Experts have been released so far, the last less than two weeks ago. Available are the Simple Search, Top Users and TCP Analyzer Experts. Here is a short summary of what these Experts do:

• Simple Search Lets you search frames and comments for raw ASCII text case-insensitively or with regular expressions.
• Top Users Lets you determine the heaviest users of network bandwidth.
• TCP Analyzer This tool analyzes network traces of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections.

The Experts can be downloaded separately and need to be installed before they can be used. It is recommended to close the Network Monitor before installing the add-ons. The Experts become then available in the Experts menu on top of the program.

Microsoft Network Monitor is offered as a free download for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system.

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Fing can be run with a single command from the command line or started in interactive mode which basically consists of a series of questions and simple answers provided by the user. The first question for example after starting the interactive mode is about the mode the software should run in. Options are discovery, scan or infos.

• Discovery: Will start the network discovery module. The user has to pick a network adapter and answer several additional questions. Fing will generate a network discovery report in the end.
• Scan: Provides the means to scan a remote host, will display ports, services and firewalls running on that server.
• Infos: Displays information about local and remote networks.

Fing offers a selection of output formats such as text, html or csv that can either be displayed directly in the console or saved in a file on the local computer system.

Verdict:

Fing is a fast network discovery tool for command line junkies. The export functionality and speed are excellent, a graphical user interface would be desirable nevertheless.

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The main interface of the monitoring software is divided into a quick server check option at the bottom which can be used to check if services such as HTTP, FTP or POP are running on a IP or domain. The networking monitoring software will automatically display the results in the same interface. Probably more interesting than the quick check function is the option to add servers permanently to the monitoring tool.

The user needs to enter a server name which is used for identification and a server address which is usually an IP address. A list of services are preselected and will be checked unless unchecked by the user. Alerts can be enabled or disabled in the same interface as well. These do have to be configured separately and can inform the user by email, screen message, executing a program or playing a sound.

There is also the possibility to add http url checks next to the default services that can be monitored by Open Monitor. This allows a user to specify an url, port, alerts and words that the page should include or exclude. This can be used for example to verify that a page is up by checking for a word on that page that is always appearing. Can also be used to run scripts that output a simple message in the end, e.g. a database check that is displaying ok if the database is up and running.

Open Monitor is a straightforward, easy to use, network monitoring software that can monitor popular services. Alternative programs are the server monitoring software IT Service View, Newt, the website monitoring software SiteMonitor or the Microsoft Network Monitor.

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Homedale is a portable wireless networking software for the Windows operating system that can probably be best described as a wlan monitor. It uses a tabbed interface that displays information about the local network adapter, the available access points and the signal strength of each access point. The access points tab lists the name and mac address of each available access point plus information about the encryption method (WEP, WPA, WPA2), the bitrates, channels and signal strength.

The wireless networking software can be used to monitor the signal strength of selected wireless adapters over time which makes it an excellent analysis tool especially for small and medium computer networks.

Homedale has a size of less than 300 Kilobytes and uses roughly 5.5 Megabytes of computer memory while running the background. The software developer does not provide information about supported operating systems; It ran without problems on a Windows XP SP3 test system.

An alternative for Windows users is Wi-Fi Signal Strenght. Linux users might want to take a look at Wavemon which can display advanced wireless information.

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The wavemon tool is a very handy tool to have in your arsenal that will help you gather information you might not otherwise have. With wavemon you can see Signal levels, Noise levels, Signal to noise ratios, frequencies, TX power, sensitivity (if available), bitrate, and so much more.

One of the only issues that might turn you off of wavemon is that it is an NCurses tool. This means the tool is run in a terminal window (I have found it runs best under Eterm) and uses ASCII to create the information it offers. Don’t let this cause you not to want to use wavemon because it is a very useful tool.

Getting and Installing

Wavemon is downloaded and installed from source. Download the tarball from the Wavemon site and save it to your hard drive. The installation steps are simple:

• decompress wavemon with the command bunzip2 xvzf wavemon-current.tar.bz2
• untar the archive with the command tar xvf wavemon-current.tar
• cd into the newly created directory with cd wavemon-current
• generate the make file will ./configure
• install wavemon with make ; make install
• start wavemon with the command wavemon

Wavemon Info Window

As you can see, in the image on the left, the Wavemon info window offers a lot of information.

At the bottom of the screen you will notice there are 10 possible options (of which some have no entries). Each of these options are different screens you can view.

The list of windows is:

• F1: Info. This is the main window that opens upon start up. This is where you get most of the information from wavemon.
• F2: Level Histogram. This displays a real-time bar-graph of Signal level, Noise level, and Signal-to-Noise Ratio.
• F3: Access point list. This feature has not been implemented yet.
• F7: Preferences. Configure Wavemon.
• F8: Help. Like a lot of Linux applications, wavemon shows the developer has a sense of humor. When you hit F8 for help it displays the message “don’t panic”. That’s it. There is more help by reading the man page (issue the command man wavemon).
• F9: About. Get all the information you need about the current wavemon release.
• F10: Quit.

You can also start wavemon with a few handy options. Those options are:

• -i This will override auto detection and use a specified network interface.
• -l Use linear level scales instead of logarithmic scales.
• -r Generate random levels for testing.

Final thoughts

If you need more information than your standard networking tools offer, and do not want to dump any extra cash into a third party offering, wavemon is just the tool for those looking to know everything there is to know about their networks. It’s easy to use, offers a ton of information, is open source, and has a tiny foot print.

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The actual capturing process does not start before the user clicks on the Start button of the application. Another possibility would be to load a previously saved session which can be displayed as well in the interface. The network traffic will be captured continuously until the user decides to stop the capturing process.

Filters can be used to narrow down the results. About 25 default filters are available like filtering by IPv4 addresses but the user can also define his own filters. Each frame is displayed listing the process name, source and destination IP, protocol name and description. Another pane is displaying details about the currently selected frame.

The network monitor runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 and is available for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the selected operating systems.

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