Easy Home Automation Projects for the Weekend Warrior: Part One
2012.08.15.18:30
People have long viewed home automation—the ability to monitor, program, and control your home’s lighting and entry locks, its heating and air conditioning, and other systems—as a technology that’s “just around the corner.” The Home of Tomorrow has been a fixture at state fairs, industry trade shows, and Disneyland; but for years it remained always a little out of reach, except for those people who could afford to invest tens of thousands of dollars to hire a professional to install a custom system.
How to Make Your Own Network Cables
2012.07.22.18:00
We show you how to clean up the rat’s nest of cables behind your PC by making custom-length network cables and wiring your own network jacks.
10 Must-Have Utilities for Small Networks
2011.04.14.01:45
Managing a network can be tricky and confusing. These utilities can help. If you have a small network at your business or home, you need help, and lots of it. These ten downloads–some free, none expensive–will make it much easier to manage your small network.
Famatech Advanced IP Scanner Version 2.2.224
Release Date: 2012.06.21
Freeware LAN Utility (Windows)
Enumerates the used IP addresses on your network and also allows limited remote control. Fast network scanning; Integration with Radmin remote access software; Remote PC Shutdown; Wake-On-LAN; Detects any network devices, including Wi-Fi routers and wireless devices; Scans ports and finds HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and shared folders; Allows you to shut down computers remotely; Supports Wake-On-Lan; Favorites list for easy network management; Export to HTML or CSV.
http://www.advancedipscanner.com
CADE
Freeware Network Diagramming
Developed primarily as a CAD tool, but it also serves as a handy network diagramming tool. CADE is a 2D vector editor for Windows. It doesn’t have some of the bells and whistles many of the costlier tools have, but it can handle the task of diagramming your network with ease. CADE offers most of the basic functionality found in Visio. Once you’ve installed CADE, you can download sample diagrams to help you get started.
http://www.weresc.com/home.php
Dia
Freeware Network Diagramming
An open source, GTK+ diagramming tool that has a shallow learning curve and can help you create basic network diagrams. Like CADE, Dia was inspired by Visio — but with a much more casual approach and feel. Dia loads and saves XML formatted documents that are gziped by default to save space. Dia is also available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.
http://live.gnome.org/Dia
Diagram Designer
Freeware Network Diagramming
Another freeware tool that suffers (like Dia) from looking a bit on the outdated side. But Diagram Designer’s ease of use should certainly make up for the old-school feel of the application. DD features include customizable template objects, a spell checker, import/export (WMF, EMF, BMP, JPEG, PNG, MNG, ICO, GIF, and PCX), a slide show viewer, a graph plotter, a calculator, MeeSoft Image Analyzer integration, and compressed file format.
http://logicnet.dk/DiagramDesigner/
Ganglia Version 3.3.2
2012.03.29
Freeware Cluster Monitoring (*NIX)
A “scalable distributed monitoring system” focused on clusters and grids. It gives you a quick and easy-to-read overview of your entire clustered system. This monitor has been ported to many platforms and is used on thousands of clusters around the world. Anyone who employs server clusters should have Ganglia monitoring that system. Ganglia can scale to handle clusters with up to 2,000 nodes.
http://ganglia.info
Gliffy
Freeware Network Diagramming
The only Web-based tool on this list. It’s easy to use and it works on any platform. With the ability to drag and drop shapes from numerous object libraries, you can have your network diagram ready in no time. You can use Gliffy for free, but if you really want to get into creating some diagrams, you may want to pony up the $4.95/month fee for 200 diagrams, 200 MB of storage, public and private diagrams, and unlimited collaborators.
http://www.gliffy.com/
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2012.03.29
Freeware Network Monitoring (*NIX)
Considered by many to be the king of open source network monitoring systems. Although not the easiest tool to set up and configure (you have to manually edit configuration files), Nagios is incredibly powerful. And even though the idea of manual configuration might turn some off, that setup actually makes Nagios one of the most flexible network monitors around. In the end, the vast number of features Nagios offers is simply unmatched. You can even set up email, SMS, and printed paper alerts!
http://www.nagios.org
SolarWinds Network Device Monitor Version 1.0
Freeware Network Tools Installer (Windows Server)
Release Date: 2010.04.25
This free tool makes it easy to monitor the real-time performance and health of a single device on your network with a cool desktop dashboard that sends up a bat signal when your device is in trouble. Monitor real-time performance and health for any device on your network with a groovy desktop dashboard. Get started immediately with an extensive collection of “out-of-the-box” monitors for popular network devices including Juniper devices, Cisco ASA appliances, HP Procurve equipment, Cisco switches, and much more. Create and share custom network device monitoring templates – one click posts your monitoring template to thwack (http://thwack.com), the SolarWinds community site. Compile custom MIBs to monitor virtually any statistic on an SNMP-enabled network device.
http://www.solarwinds.com/products/freetools/network-device-monitor
Microsoft Network Monitor Version 3.4
Freeware LAN Utility (Windows)
Release Date: 2011.03.25
Ever wonder exactly what is being sent across your network–the packets that comprise the lowest level of network traffic and which programs are sending them? If the answer is yes, Network Monitor 3.4– a free utility from Microsoft–is all you need to find out what’s flowing back and forth.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=983b941d-06cb-4658-b7f6-3088333d062f&displaylang=en
Observium
2012.03.29
Freeware Network Monitoring (*NIX)
“An autodiscovering PHP/MySQL/SNMP-based network monitoring [tool].” It focuses on Linux, UNIX, Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, Foundry, HP, and more. With Observium, you’ll find detailed graphs and an incredibly easy-to-use interface. It can monitor a huge number of processes and systems. The only downside is a lack of auto alerts. But to make up for that, you can set Observium up alongside a tool like Nagios for up/down alerts.
http://www.observium.org
Microsoft SysInternals SharEnum
Release Date: 2006.11.01
Free Server Tools
ShareEnum is an obscure but very useful tool. ShareEnum shows you all file shares on your network. Even better, it shows you their associated security information. This very small (94K) tool might become one of the most valuable and useful security tools that you possess. It is another free tool from Microsoft.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897442.aspx
Spiceworks
2012.03.29
Freeware Network Monitoring
Becoming one of the industry standard free network/system monitoring tools. Although you have to put up with some ads, the features and Web-based interface can’t be beat. Spiceworks monitors (and autodiscovers) your systems, alerts you if something is down, and offers outstanding topographical tools. It also allows you to get social with fellow IT pros via the Spiceworks community, which is built right in.
http://www.spiceworks.com
yEd
Freeware Network Diagramming
A Java-based tool that’s available for Windows and Linux. It has a great user interface and features diagram creation, auto-layout, data import (GraphML, Excel XLS, GEDCOM, GML, XML), and data export (PDF, SWF, JPG, GIF, BMP, and HTML image maps). The auto-layout feature is particularly cool. It uses a wide range of sophisticated layout algorithms to automatically arrange your diagrams, saving you time and effort.
http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yed_about.html
Zabbix Version 1.8.11
2012.03.29
Freeware Network Monitoring (*NIX)
Is as powerful as any other network monitoring tool, and it also offers user-defined views, zooming, and mapping on its Web-based console. Zabbix offers agent-less monitoring, collects nearly ANY kind of data you want to monitor, does availability and SLA reporting, and can monitor up to 10,000 devices. You can even get commercial support for this outstanding open source product. One unique Zabbix feature is the option to set audible alerts. Should something go down, have Zabbix play a sound file (say, a Star Trek red alert klaxon?).
http://www.zabbix.com