Wget can do a lot of things browsers can not do, which makes it an incredibly valuable tool for users who do a lot of downloading. Wget can even re-connect and finish a download if a connection is dropped. Let’s take a look and see how to make best use of this very powerful tool.

Installation

Installation for wget is very simple, as it will be found in the standard repositories. You can install wget from either the command line (such as yum install wget or sudo apt-get install wget) or you can also install wget from the Add/Remove Applications tool (Ubuntu Software Center, PackageKit, Synaptic, etc) by doing the following:

1. Open the tool.
2. Search for “wget” (no quotes).
3. Mark for installation.
4. Apply.

Usage

Remember, wget is a command line only tool (although there are front-ends available) so you will need to either be working from within a terminal window or logged onto a virtual terminal. Now that you have the right tool open, let’s see how wget can help you.

The basic usage is:

wget ADDRESS_TO_FILE

Where ADDRESS_TO_FILE is the actual address (URL or IP) to the file you want to download.

The above will download a single file to your hard drive. Now, what if you have a need to do an recursive downloading? For example there is an entire directory of files you need to download. To do recursive downloading on a remote directory the command would be:

wget -r ADDRESS_TO_DIRECTORY/DIRECTORY

The above command will download a directory hierarchy that matches the hierarchy downloaded from. In other words, within the directory you ran the wget command, you will find (using the above as an example) a newly created directory called ADDRESS_TO_DIRECTORY. Within that directory will be all of the subdirectories you downloaded.

If you don’t want to download the hierarchy, just the files, you would add the -nd switch like so:

wget -r -nd ADDRESS_TO_DIRECTORY/DIRECTORY

Now the only thing that will download is the files contained within DIRECTORY.

What if the address or directory you are downloading requires a username and password? You can pass that along with the wget command like so:

wget -r -nd --user=USERNAME --password=PASSWORD ADDRESS_TO_DIRECTORY/DIRECTORY

Where USERNAME is the required username, PASSWORD is the required password, ADDRESS_TO_DIRECTORY is the address and DIRECTORY is the directory containing the files.

Now, if you want to run wget in the background (so you don’t have to be logged in) you would issue the command as such:

wget -bqc ADDRESS_TO_FILE/FILE

Where ADDRESS_TO_FILE is the address containing the file and FILE is the file name to be downloaded.

Final thoughts

You will find wget to be one of the more useful tools in your Linux toolkit. And once you start using it you will never look back.

System Information for Windows can display information about a computer system’s software and hardware inventory and network information. It furthermore provides access to a set of tools that can perform a variety of tasks from changing a network adapter’s MAC address to dumping the computer bios or testing the computer monitor.

The system information can be accessed from the left sidebar that sorts them into software, hardware and network categories or the header of the application that provides access to all information that are accessible on the sidebar and the tools menu that links to all tools that are included.

The information that are displayed are very extensive, the program lists for example the following:

• Software Inventory: Operating System, Installed Software and Hotfixes, Processes, Services, Users, Open Files, System Uptime, Installed Codecs, Software Licenses (Product Keys / Serial Numbers / CD Key), Secrets (Password Recovery).
• Hardware Inventory: Motherboard, Sensors, BIOS, CPU, chipset, PCI/AGP, USB and ISA/PnP Devices, Memory, Video Card, Monitor, Disk Drives, CD/DVD Devices, SCSI Devices, S.M.A.R.T., Ports, Printers.
• Network Information: Network Cards, Network Shares, currently active Network Connections, Open Ports.
• Network Tools: MAC Address Changer, Neighborhood Scan, Ping, Trace, Statistics
• Miscellaneous Tools: Eureka! (Reveal lost passwords hidden behind asterisks), Monitor Test, Shutdown / Restart.
• Real-time monitors: CPU, Memory, Page File usage and Network Traffic.

Here are some real world examples of what you can do with System Information For Windows besides displaying the installed software or computer hardware:

• List Windows product key as well as serial numbers of other installed applications.
• Configure Autorun, Browser Helper Objects and other drivers or programs that are loaded during startup.
• Display temperature of computer hardware if the hardware makes use of sensors.
• Display all open ports and network shares on the system
• Display passwords that are hidden behind asterisks
• Perform a broadband speed test

System Information For Windows can be used to generate an inventory report of a computer system in no time. The extensive reporting options of the pro version make it ideal for that purpose.

The tools that are provided make several tools that users might otherwise use unnecessary which could be one of the reasons to install this version of the software.

Differences between System Information for Windows pro and free version:

• The pro version has a reporting option that can be used to generate system information reports that can be saved as html, xml, txt or csv reports. The free version only supports html reports.
• The free version has several restrictions. It is for instance not allowed to use the software in a business environment
• Several command line parameters are not available in the free version

The version that is offered at the Giveaway of the Day website is System Information for Windows Pro Business Edition. The program’s standard price is $69.

Positive

• Runs on both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows
• Extensive system information
• Reporting option
• Tools for various tasks

Negative

• No alarms. It would be nice if alarms could be configured, e.g. when the temperature level reaches a maximum.
• Processing information directly. Instead of only displaying information it would be nice if they could be processed directly. The software inventory displays for instance the installed applications but there is no way to uninstall them directly.
• Tries to install Registry Booster during installation

System Information for Windows Pro can be downloaded for free today at the Giveaway of the Day website. The developer’s website with additional information (like the command line parameters) is available here.

Viable alternatives are the free version of SIW, Speccy, Open Hardware Monitor or PC Wizard.

Etherape is a graphical network monitoring tool based on etherman that features link-layer, tcp, and ip modes. Etherape is a real time monitor who’s graphic representation instantly changes as network traffic goes in and out. You can use Etherape live or have it read from a dump file. Etherape supports Ethernet, FDDI, Token Ring, ISDN, PPP and SLIP devices so you shouldn’t have any problem getting it to work on your network.

Installing

Installing Etherape is simple. Open up your Add/Remove Software utility, do a search for “etherape” and select the entry when it appears. Apply the changes to install the application. If you prefer to go the command line route you can isse the command “sudo apt-get install etherape”. Once you have the application installed you can start Etherape by issuing the command etherape from a command line. You can also start Etherape from the Applications menu by looking in the Tools | System Tools submenus.

The Main Window

When you first open up Etherape (you will need the root password) you will see a blank window with some buttons and menus. At this point you are not capturing any packets because you haven’t instructed Etherape what interfaces to use.

Configure Etherape Interfaces

In order to configure the interface click on the Capture menu and then click in the Interfaces sub-menu. Select the interface your machine uses to continue. Note that, as of this writing, Etherape does not support the Wifi0 interface. If you are using wireless you will most likely be able to use ath0.

Once you have configured the interface select the Mode type from the same menu you found the Interfaces entry.

Etherape will immediately begin capturing packets. You will see the large black window quickly fill with traffic. Depending upon your network your window can fill up very quickly. You will also notice that Etherape contains a color-coded legend.

Etherape Capturing Packets

By default CUPS and Domain are blue, WWW, TCP, ICMP are red, IMAP2 is purple, and POP3 is yellow. These colors can be changed in the Preferences window to whatever you like.

As you can see (in the image to the right) there is a lot of external traffic. But what if you only want to monitor internal traffic? Simple In the Preferences window click on the Diagram tab. You will see a small text area labeled “Capture Filter”. In this text area you will enter something similar to: ip and src net 192.168 and dst net 192.168 (where 192.168 is the first two sections of your internal network addressing.)

Once you enter that information, click Save, and the preferences window will go away. Etherape will now start capturing only your internal traffic.

Reading From Files

Etherape can read files from the tcpdump application. But you must run tcpdump with the -n and -w flags. The tcpdump command would be run like so: tcpdump -n -w dump_file. Once you are satisfied you have enough information you can stop the dump with ctrl-c. Once you have your dump file you can open it by going to File and then selected Open. The captured packets will display in real time as they were captured during tcpdump’s run.

Final Thoughts

Etherape is the perfect tool for monitoring network traffic. Not only is it simple to use, it gives you instant output as traffic comes in and out of your network.

The Server Monitoring Software however is offering a wealth of tools and options to monitor networks, servers and websites of which some are restricted to the commercial version of the monitoring software. The user can add a number of IPs or domain names that should be monitored by the software. It monitors response time and packets in real time and graphs that display the data as well.

Alerts can be set if the host is not responding or if the server response time or packet loss rate reaches a certain number. Four events can be configured: Message on the desktop, send an email, play a sound or show an icon in the system tray.

The free version of NetTools provides access to several network tools like Ping, Lookup or Trace but also more advanced tools like network and host scans.

I personally think it’s a bit unfortunate to mix free and commercial versions into the free version which might confuse the user at the beginning. Networking Monitoring Software Look@Lan offers most of the features as well but is completely free.

Most operating systems have those tools on board and it is normally not required to use an external tool. Many users however do not like to work with the command line in Windows and prefer a graphical user interface instead. Many also have difficulties issuing the correct commands, e.g. finding out how to save the result in a text document automatically.

eToolz is a collection of network and Internet tools that provides a graphical interface for several common commands. This includes ping and tracert but also DNS and whois lookups, mail checks, the retrieval of http headers, time synchronization, pagerank check and list with useful information (default ports, domain extensions).

Most functions come with several options. It is for instance possible to select one of six whois databases, define timeouts, ping counts or the maximum amount of hops of a tracert. Every echo in the program can be copied normally. Five languages are supported: German, English, French, Portuguese and Dutch although a few of the information are still not translated and therefor in German.

The developer of the product uses Google Translate to provide an English version of the homepage, ever heard of Nazi lookups ? Yeah, me neither.

Top ten tools are Nessus, Wireshark (former Ethereal), Snort, Netcat, Metasploit Framework, Hping2, Kismet, TcpDump, Cain and Abel and finally John the Ripper.

This is a great collection of the most important network security tools of 2006.