PuTTY is a free terminal emulation tool that’s been available for 20 years. Originally released for Microsoft Windows, this versatile remote administration tool can be used to access workstations, servers, network devices etc using various protocols such as secure shell connection (SSH), Telnet, Rlogin etc. While it continues to be popular for accessing network devices […]

I first got acquainted with TFTP at the beginning of my networking career. The first use-case of TFTP protocol is when I first upgraded the IOS firmware of a Cisco router using a little software utility called “TFTPD32”. Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) software provide a key service to many network and system administrators for […]

With the rise of distributed networks, finding a secure way to transfer files and data is essential. That’s where software products like Secure File Transfer Protocol, better known as SFTP, comes in. File Transfer Protocol has been around since 1971; the encrypted version was developed in 1994. This popular file transfer communication protocol is able […]

Companies these days need to deal with and manage vast inventories of network and IT assets. Keeping track of these assets, tagging them, and knowing their status at all times is essential to the operations of any modern company. Image Source As you’d expect, this is a big job but network inventory software makes it […]

For businesses, the task of network and IT infrastructure monitoring remains highly important. A company cannot afford to ignore the security and performance of its network and IT resources. Nagios remains one of the most popular solutions for IT infrastructure monitoring today. An entire suite of software allows businesses to take control and have visibility […]

Usually, commercial and enterprise grade network routers (such as Cisco, Juniper, HPE etc) run on their own proprietary operating system (OS) software which runs only on the specific vendor’s hardware devices. However, the Open Source community has developed some great Router OS software that can power commodity hardware such as x86 computers or regular SOHO […]

As network engineers, having insights about how our network performs can save us from a lot of headaches. That’s where software tools for network diagnostics are useful for every networking professional. Pingplotter is a network diagnostic software utility used to monitor packet loss, latency, jitter etc in data packets along network paths. This tool lets […]

Cacti is a popular open source networking tool that is web based, and it is used both for network monitoring and graphing. In my work environment we use Cacti extensively to mainly monitor bandwidth on interfaces of switches etc. It is a complex tool to learn but very powerful.  With Cacti you can poll services, […]

As network engineers and administrators, we mostly focus on managing and configuring hardware devices such as routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers etc. We rarely deal with software management tools which are equally important in a corporate network. Without knowing the health, performance, availability and quality of your network is like running with closed eyes. Network […]

As network engineers we are usually assigned various tasks related to the life-cycle of networks, starting from the initial design, procurement, installation of network equipment and then management and monitoring of existing networks. In the latter phase (management and monitoring of networks) we are constantly faced with major or minor problems such as links going […]

Network simulation tools allow students (e.g people studying for Cisco Exams) to easily learn the core concepts of computer networking and TCP/IP in general. Even professionals could benefit from these tools by simulating network environments and get an idea of how a network will work before actual implementation. Moreover, system administrators could use them as […]

Syslog is the De Facto standard used in Networks for sending/receiving Log messages from IT systems, network devices, hosts etc. The Syslog protocol runs over port UDP 514 and is based on the IETF RFC 5424 standard. Almost all network connected devices (routers, switches, firewalls, Unix systems, Windows systems etc) support the Syslog protocol for […]

In my enterprise work environment, our corporate private and public network spans across many buildings and locations and uses thousands of private IP addresses (in the range specified by RFC1918) and hundreds of public IPs as well. How do we handle the management of such a huge address space? The secret is an IPAM (IP […]