Software Products and Open Source Implements

Layer Four Traceroute

LFT is an alternative traceroute tool with several advanced packet tracing mechanisms (TCP, UDP, ICMP). It detects stateful elements (filters, load balancers, ...) in the path and has many advanced features such as Autonomous System (ASN) lookups, network name resolution, et al. LFT continues to evolve and provide more and more useful data to network engineers and to anyone else that cares how IP datagrams are being routed. With the advent of smarter firewalls, traffic engineering, QoS, and per-protocol packet forwarding, LFT has become an invaluable tool for many network managers worldwide.

WhoB Client

WhoB is a no-frills whois client designed to provide everything a network engineer needs to know about a routed IP address by typing one line and reading one line. It can display the origin-ASN based on the global routing table at that time, the 'origin' ASN registered in the RADB (IRR), the NETname and ORGname, etc. Of course, there are some other advanced features worth taking a look at. WhoB performs the lookups quickly, the output is easily parsed by automated programs, and and it even supports bulk resolution of files containing IP addresses. WhoB uses the VOSTROM WhoIs C Library (and you can too, quite easily). Recent LFT (Layer Four Traceroute) distributions include WhoB functionality as a standalone client placed in the LFT binary directory.

Prefix WhoIs

The Prefix WhoIs Project provides a whois-compatible client and server framework for disclosing various up-to-date routing information. Instead of using registrar-originated information (which is often unspecific or inaccurate), Prefix WhoIs uses the Internet's global routing table as gleaned from a number of routing peers around the Internet.

pWhoIs Widget

The Prefix WhoIs widget displays the number of prefixes present within the global Internet routing table and allows the user to submit queries to the Prefix WhoIs project using a familiar Dashboard interface.

HTTP Object Compression Efficiency Analyzer

This web application uses a simple mathematical approach to determine whether or not HTTP compression should be enabled on the URL submitted. This is a common concern amongst web masters because reducing the size of an object by compressing it causes the expenditure of processing time and the passage of real time. Simply put, time spent compressing an object before transmitting it may outweigh the time-benefit of reducing its transfer-size.

vCard-to-CMXML PHP Directory Script for Cisco IP Phones

This simple script lets anyone using Cisco IP Phones with a home-grown PBX take advantage of their vCards by displaying them in a browsable, searchable directory.

WhoIs Client Libraries

Cross-platform compatible libraries for accessing WhoIs-type information from many sources are provided for the C language and for PHP. The C library supports interrogation of many registrars with advanced features such as bulk resolution and automatic drilldown/referral querying. The PHP libraries are specific to Prefix WhoIs and RIPE NCC's RIS WhoIs, but they support bulk resolution transactions and use PHP's sockets which makes a quick call to the services reasonable when displaying various network information on a web page.

Acropolis ExtraNet Framework

A lightweight extranet solution implemented as a monolithic PHP class library. It allows for encrypted authentication against a variety of sources inlucing Microsoft® ActiveDirectory (or any other LDAP/SSL server), a relational database like MySQL or PostgreSQL, or against an IMAP/POP server. It also supports page templates and an extensible menu system, et al. An enterprise-class extranet framework without the frills.

Currently Jul 9th 2008, 10:58am GMT