Networking Tools

Most of these could be on the Unix Sysadmin page also, but it was getting cluttered.

• Implement a VPN solution with PPTP on FreeBSD: here is the source code and the article.
• A sample firewall ruleset for FreeBSD 4. It is complete ruleset that I explicitely designed to be very configurable. Use it with this rc.conf file. This setup is also documented in an article.
• A Dynamic DNS update program. I use it to keep my DSL hostname current (it has a dynamic IP address).
• A network traffic analyzer. Basic but still useful, it parses the output of tcpdump and creates HTML reports.
• Ever wished you could read tcpdump output, instead of having to wade through hex codes calculator in hand? I wrote tcpdump2ascii for that purpose: it displays a tcpdump output using ASCII characters. It also reformats the dump to fit your terminal. Useful for snooping the wire for data. Give it a try, the result is impressive, allowing you to watch your network traffic in clear, in real-time.
• A TCP client and server as well as a UDP client and server, both in Perl. Useful for network performance testing.