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We asked our bloggers to give us a list of the free or nearly free network tools they love. They had tons of them, ranging from ways to track network device configurations to ways to keep data synched between multiple devices.
The list is more or less organized by the blogger who recommended them, although in some cases (Wireshark, iPerf) more than one blogger recommends the tool. We hope you find, and try, some goodies on the list.
Scott Hogg
Scott Hogg loves:
Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ RANCID
Not everyone can afford Solarwinds Orion Network Configuration Management (NCM) or CiscoWorks LAN Management Solution (LMS) to manage changes to their network device configurations. That is why Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ (RANCID) continues to be a favorite tool among network engineers. RANCID is easy to install and configure on a variety of operating systems.
RANCID's real benefit to network administrators is its ability to back up network device configurations and help you investigate changes to your environment. Since most network issues are attributable to human error, it is valuable to have that historical record of what changed. Configuration management is one of the best practices that typically go by the wayside for organizations on a limited IT budget. Oftentimes the root cause of a problem can be easily found within that list of differences between yesterday'ss and today's configuration.
JMeter
You may also need to assess application performance because people tend to "blame it on the network." To validate that a problem is not within the network domain and assess application performance, a tool like JMeter comes in handy. JMeter is a simple Java application that can perform load tests on a wide variety of web-based applications, FTP, and other protocol traffic.
It takes just a moment to download the package, unzip it into a directory, run the JMeter application and get started configuring your test. Just make sure you already have Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed. There are a wide variety of tests and test options. The easiest way to get started is to first create a Thread Group and then apply your tests beneath that. Then you can run the test and look at the results/reports that you configured for...