Submitted by Igor Vinnykov – Blog: www.emco.is

Ping Monitor Free is a tool for tracking connections with hosts in the local network and Internet. It detects connections statuses by sending regular pings and analyzing responses. Ping Monitor Free can work in 24/7 mode to track connections states and calculate connections statistics. When connections are lost or restored, it can display messages in System Tray or send notifications by e-mail. Also it can execute custom actions on these events.

This tool is certified by Microsoft for Windows 7 compatibility. Free version allows to monitor up to 5 hosts, commercial version is also available and allows to monitor unlimited number of hosts.

EMCO Ping Monitor Free

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Submitted by Inian

NetFlow Analyzer is a, web based, bandwidth monitoring, network forensics and network traffic analysis tool that has been optimizing thousands of networks across varied industries for peak performance and helping them to put their bandwidth for a better use. NetFlow Analyzer gives detailed information on network bandwidth usage pattern for traffic analysis, capacity planning and making policy decisions. By drilling down into the specific applications, users, ports or communication network managers are able to determine the exact source of spikes and bursts and therefore able to proactively monitor, control, and take informed decisions. NetFlow Analyzer runs both in Windows & Linux. Cisco NetFlow, jFlow, sFlow, IPFIX are some of the few technologies supported by NetFlow Analyzer for network traffic monitoring.

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Some days ago, I reviewed WinPing, a portable ping GUI. Readers have suggested Nirsoft’s PingInfoView and PingPlotter. I will have quick look at PingInfoView in this post.

Like WinPing, PingInfoView is a standalone application requiring no installation. The main difference is that Nirsoft’s tool summarizes the host responses in a table instead of continuously displaying each reply separately, like you are used to, from the command line interface.

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My favorite port scanner is nmap—not the mere command line version, but together with the GUI Zenmap. The disadvantage of nmap is that it is sometimes too powerful. If you only want to run some simple port scans every now and then, you probably will prefer a simpler tool that just has the features you really need. Advanced Port Scanner is such a tool, even though its name seems to imply something different. Nevertheless, it has all the functions most admins need.

What distinguishes Advanced Port Scanners from similar tools is its wizard that helps newbies to configure the tool. For instance, the wizard asks how fast the computers in your network are and how many you have.

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As a GUI fetishist, I sometimes think the command prompt’s only right to exist is the ping command. It is not that there are no GUI tools for ping. I already reviewed two in the past (eToolz, FREEping). But somehow after working with such a tool for a while, I come back to the command prompt. Perhaps it is not that easy to change a decade-old habit. From a rational point of view, it certainly makes sense to use a GUI-based ping tool.

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We recently migrated our Windows Server 2003 based DHCP Server to Windows Server 2008 R2 because I wanted to use Network Access Protection to improve our network security. After half an hour the software was installed and I started to configure the DHCP server. I quickly defined scope, NAP configuration, and all the other options and all I had left to do was move the DHCP reservations to the new server. I had no intention of transferring the addresses manually—it’s not that I am lazy, but copying and pasting many items is an error-prone process—and so I started looking for a migration tool.

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Binverse, raffles a one year plan for an all-in-one Usenet solution worth 237.96 U.S. dollars. You will find more information about this contest at the end of the article. Please note that this is a sponsored post.

If you can find some time to break away from the relentless demands of systems and users (mostly the latter) perhaps it’s time you revisit an old friend, Usenet.

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Karen’s LAN Monitor is a freeware tool that displays all kinds of network related information. The tool comes with eight tabs: Adapters, Phonebook Entries, Connections, Traffic, IP Stats, TCP Stats, UDP Stats, and ICMP Stats. I have created a screenshot for each tab because this is the fastest way to give you an idea as to what kind of information you can retrieve with Karen’s LAN Monitor. I like the tool because you can access all the data quickly. Unfortunately, it has to be installed. It would be much more useful, if one could just launch it on a computer to get a quick overview of all network-related information.

Adapters

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NetSpeedMonitor is a very simple freeware tool that allows you to monitor the network speed and the amount of data transferred. The utility comes with a systray icon that displays the current up and downstream speed. If you click on the icon, NetSpeedMonitor will show you the amount of data that has been transferred in this session, on that day, and in this month. The tool also supports monthly and daily data transfer logging. If you have servers running in the cloud, this could be useful, if you have doubts that your provider logs the transferred data correctly.

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Many things have been said about Windows 7 and its benefits. However, the talk rarely covered the topic of IPv6. Surely it isn’t a new feature: Vista was fully Ipv6 enabled and an IPv6 network stack exists for Windows XP. But in my opinion IPv6 is worth mentioning when talking about Windows 7.

Most networks today are still based on IPv4 because the Clients are not IPv6 capable. A lot of companies hesitated to migrate to Vista and still run Windows XP without the IPv6 stack. However, this circumstance will change with the release and deployment of Windows 7. Might IPv6, which technically is an old story, become more attention when Windows 7 is deployed en masse?

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Submitted by Peder Vendelbo Mikkelsen

NetworkMiner is a free tool to collect information about hosts “speaking” to the network.

From the publisher:

NetworkMiner is a Network Forensic Analysis Tool (NFAT) for Windows. NetworkMiner can be used as a passive network sniffer/packet capturing tool in order to detect operating systems, sessions, hostnames, open ports etc. without putting any traffic on the network. NetworkMiner can also parse PCAP files for off-line analysis and to regenerate/reassemble transmitted files and certificates from PCAP files.

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NetWorx is a nifty free traffic and bandwidth monitoring tool. It supports usage reporting, speed metering, quotas, graphical netstat (current network connections), trace route, and ping. The tool comes in a portable version that can be easily run on a PC if users suspect odd things are happening to their computers. The tool also has some features that could prove useful in a server environment.

NetWorx places itself in the systray from where all its tools can be easily reached. The following is a brief introduction to each function.

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TCP Analyzer was just added recently to CodePlex, Microsoft’s Open Source platform. It is the first Network Monitor Expert (extension) that was not developed by the Network Monitor team, but from Microsoft Research. It allows you to analyze network traces of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections.

Statistical analysis is only useful if you analyze large amounts of data. So if you open a big Network Monitor capture file, keep in mind that the parsing process can take a while, and that it will require your CPU’s full attention. Thus, I would wait until parsing is completed before selecting a specific TCP connection and launch TCP Analyzer from Network Monitor’s Experts menu.­

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In the last post in this series, I introduced the Network Monitor Experts, which basically is a set of plug-ins for Microsoft Network Monitor 3.3. Top Users Expert is an extension that helps you find heavy talkers in a captured trace. “Users” should not be understood literally here. In this context, users essentially are just IP addresses. Top User Experts enables you to analyze how much bandwidth machines connected to your computer are using. This can be useful if your network is clogged and you want to find the culprit. Of course, there are many other scenarios, such as when you have to know how much bandwidth a certain service requires.

Like the other extensions, Top User Expert analyzes a Network Monitor capture file. That is, you can’t apply the tool to a Capture tab. To use Top User Expert, you have to open a capture file first, and then launch the program from the Experts menu.

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Microsoft Network Monitor is probably the only free network and protocol analysis tool that is a match for Wireshark. It still lacks a few features when it comes analyzing stored network traces and that’s where the Network Monitor Experts comes in. At the moment, there are three available Open Source extensions: TCP Analyzer, Simple Search, and Top Users.

These extensions are separate tools that require Network Monitor 3.3. After you have installed them, you will find them in the Experts menu. This menu is only displayed when you open a previously stored file. Today, I will introduce Simple Search and in the next two posts, I will discuss Top Users and TCP Analyzer.

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