Network Tools and Friends, or, what I have installed on my Work laptop.

These are the network tools I find useful to have installed in my Work laptop.

I always miss having a checklist when I decide to fire up a new VM/laptop, so here it is.

The tools below are my personal choice. They're not all Network Tools per se, but you cannot do any proper work without them, so I included them anyway.

Most of these have equivalent/superior GNU/Linux variants. Except for fucking diagrams where nothing is really useful. No, Dia is not good enough, until it can edit Visio XML at the very least.

Most Linux tools are available on OS X via MacPorts. I understand the old cygwin can provide a framework to install the same tools on Windows, and maybe a lot of them have directly ported text Windows versions. In my book, you only need them if all you have available is Windows. Windows is the last option for me, when all others are not available.

My current work laptop is a Mac. I run VMWare Fusion with Outlook and Visio in it. Simply because Outlook for Mac is horrible and there are many really big visio files that corrupt once converted to OmniGraffle format and I cannot get them back to Visio XML. MS you are a motherfucker.

I used to have a large Linux tools library, but it's been like 3 years since I last used GNU/Linux as a desktop, so I forgot most of them.

I do not support nor use pirated software. That's my life, if you think otherwise, save yourself time and don't bother discussing it with me. It's a dead end.

* Marked OS Neutral items aren't available for Linux, unfortunately.

OS neutral
Wireshark
SecureCRT / PuTTY / KiTTY
GNS3 / IOU

Filezilla

Evernote
Firefox / Chrome
Dropbox
Adobe Reader
VirtualBox
Java
TeamViewer
Gimp
MS Office* (Sorry, no LibreOffice in my list)
1Password* with Dropbox sync
tor (basically to test a random incoming connection from somewhere in the Internet)
iperf / jperf

Windows
tftpd32 by Philippe JOUNIN
Notepad++
MS Visio
VMWare Workstation
Meld
cygwin (just because)

OS X
MacPorts
OmniGraffle
TextEdit/SublimeText2
iTerm2
Cyberduck
Dig interface by EmbeddedSoft.ca
VMWare Fusion
Kaleidoscope
TftpServer
WifiExplorer


Linux
GEdit / VIm
lftp
irssi
Dia (I really hate it)
screen / tmux (tmux is cool, I can log sessions way easily with it)
iftop
tshark
tcpdump
tftpd (any variant will do, whatever the distro offers)
ftpd (generally vsftpd, but same rule as above)
syslog-ng or any variant that allows incoming udp syslog messages
nc (netcat)
watch
smokeping / fping / hping / arping
ettercap