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.

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The first section will display information about the blog’s responses. This includes checking the web server’s IP, RSS feed, robots.txt file, web caching and search engine indexation in Google and Bing. The second section will display technical details about the blog which are mostly interesting to the webmaster of the website.

The technical details will display page generation and fetch times, transfer speeds, information about compression as well as the version of the blog software and the theme used.

The site links to three additional services that can be used to check out a website or blog. This includes HTML verification at W3c, feed validation at Feedvalidator and HTTP header checks at redbot.com.Is My Blog Working is a great way to quickly check various technical details of a blog. A bookmarklet is provided that can might also come in handy.

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Internet Maniac combines a set of networking tools in its interface. The portable software provides access to functions like traceroutes, pings, host lookups, whois information, lookup IPs or domain names and more. Every option is directly accessible from the main interface.

A click on an option will usually display a second window that can be used to enter data, say a domain name for Whois. The same window will also display the results of the function directly in its window.

The tool is completely portable and requires less than 5 Megabytes of computer memory. The homepage of the developer has been deleted a long time ago. You can download the latest available version of Internet Maniac right here at Ghacks (internet maniac).

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One major problem is the reliability of those speed tests on the Internet. Some show lower speeds even if the Internet connection is able to handle faster speeds. This can be due to server capacities at the speed test host, the location of the servers in the world or general routing problems that affect the measured speed.

Speed.io is the first broadband speed test on the Internet that measured the speed of an Internet connection correctly. Every other speed test was usually missing a few thousand Kbits. The service measures the download and upload speed, the maximum number of connections and the response time of the Internet connection.

The download speed test result was 14806 Kbit and the result of the upload speed test was 990 Kbit which comes close to the maximum capacities of the 16 Mbit / 1 Mbit advertised speed of the Internet provider.

The developers of Speed.io claim to utilize 50.000 servers world wide for their speed tests which seems an awful lot but would be an incredible infrastructure if this was the case. Still, it does not really matter if they have 1 or 50K servers as long as the speed tests are accurate.

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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.

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This Firefox tip does not require a plugin, add-on or Greasemonkey script. All you need to do is create a new bookmark of the url: http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=ping&host=%s. Now all that is left to do is to add the keyword ping to the service when you add it as a bookmark.

The keyword command is a way to access an url without typing it. The good thing about is that you can pass parameters. If you want to ping a server you enter ping url in the address bar of Firefox, e.g. ping ghacks.net.

Firefox will recognize the ping keyword and load the url http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=ping&host=ghacks.net which displays the ping on the website.

You can do the same in Opera. The keywords are named nicknames there but are basically the same. I have not tested it but it should work fine. Let me know if you try that out.

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Checking if a website is up or not should be speedy, you do not want to waste your time analyzing large log files if there is another faster way to accomplish the check. This article is therefor concentrating on methods that reveal results in a matter of seconds which are easy to interpretate.

If you know of a method that is missing let me know and I will check it out and add it if it makes a good fit. On we go with ways to check if a website is really down.

1. Ping

A ping basically sends an Hello to a server waiting for an response. If the response takes to long a timeout will occur. Ping is measured in ms, if it is incredibly high something is wrong with either your computer, the route in between or the destination.

The command is similar in Windows and Linux, just enter ping destination, with destination being an IP or domain name, and wait for the response.

One of the many online scripts that ping servers is located at Ping.eu. It offers other network tools like Traceroute and a port check as well.

2. Traceroute

You can compare Tracerouter with a list of all the roads that you travel until you reach your destination. Only that the roads are the servers in this case that your data is send through to reach their destination. If everything is fine the destination server should appear at the end, if it is not you could get timeouts for instance.

Traceroute Tool from the University of Princeton displays the traceroute between the University and another server on the Internet, you can enter the IP or domain name of the server.

Tracert is the command that you can use in Windows to trace the route between your computer and the destination. Use the command “tracert IP” or “tracert domain” to achieve this. Traceroute is the equivalent in Linux.

3. Domain Name System (DNS)

DNS errors most of the time occur when a website is freshly registered or moving to another server. It usually takes some time to update the DNS records to point at the new server. DNS is providing information much like your phone book is. Domain names are for us puny humans who have troubles remembering those server IP addresses (64.233.161.18 for Google for instance). Problems occur when the Nameservers who translate the human entered domain names into IP addresses have still the old IP in their records while the website is already up and running on the new IP.

You can use the online script DNS Report to receive a detailed report. Green results are fine, red ones point to failures and yellow ones are warnings.

4. Proxies

Proxys can be used to establish connections to websites even if the direct route from your computer to theirs is somehow blocked. You can compare that to visiting a friend and using his computer to connect to a server that you cannot connect to. If it works it is somehow related to your computer or connection.

You can find hundreds of web based proxies at Proxy.org. Try some and see if you can connect to the website.

5. Ask someone

If you have direct contact to other users, be it in IRC, Skype, Instant Messengers or even forums, you can ask them if they would be kind enough to check a particular website for you. That`s practically a substitute to using a proxy.

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Here is a short list of all the other tools mentioned: Nmap, Nessus Remote Security Scanner, John the Ripper, Nikto, Superscan, pof, Ethereal, Yersinia, LCP, Cain and Abel, Kismet, Netstumbler and hping. Make sure you check the tools that you do not know about yet, it might be worth it.

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