Troubleshoot Your Network for Free

Network administrators need all kinds of tools to

troubleshoot their network. iNetTools is a free small testing suite from

Wildpackets, which contains several tools to make the life of the network

administrator easier. There's an easy to use menu driven system to use all the

tools. Some of the tools include ping, ping scan, port scan, service scan,

finger, whois, DNS lookup, Name scan, Name lookup, DNS lookup, and Trace route.

The best part is that you can run all the tests simultaneously with it. It also

shows information about the ARP cache content, network Statistics, etc. You can

also save the results for later reference.

Another useful feature of the tool is Internet port

description, which provides information about commonly used ports. It runs on

both Windows 2000 and Windows XP machines, but we tried it on the latter for

this article.

To perform a DNS lookup, give the IP address of the domain name you want to find. Don't forget to specify a DNS Server address. Click on 'Start' to begin the DNS lookup You can do throughput scan of any URL, which even shows the files and directory names present in that webpage and how much time it took to do the whole scan Ping Scan lets you customize packet size and timeout. The response time and resolved names are displayed too Use Service Scan to find out which services (http, ftp) are running on a particular range of IPs on your network

Swapnil Arora