Hobbycode

Tools every network engineer should have handy

Monitoring

MRTG – Open source SNMP monitoring solution.

PRTG – Commercial/Graphical version of the popular open source MRTG.  Free version will monitor 3 OID’s.  Useful for troubleshooting a single device.

3D SNMP N.E.T – Looks to be competition to Solar Winds Network Engineers Toolkit.  Unreleased as of this writing.  Looks promising

NetStumbler – Wireless 802.11A/B/G analysis for Windows

TCP View – Shows you all open TCP/UDP ports in real time.

nTop - If you don’t have a Netflow/sFlow device handy, this might do the trick.  Open source.  Windows version crippled though.

Security

Nipper – Tool for generating security or configuration reports on network devices

Nessus – Security vernerability scanning and assessment tool

Utilities

Solar Winds TFTP – Small TFTP server suitable for using on your laptop.

Solar Winds Subnet Calculator – Most people study subnetting hard for tests, then forget much of it.  This tool comes in real handy for those of us who hate math!

Softperfect Network Scanner – An excellent, free, ICMP/SNMP/NetBIOS network scanner.

Putty – Free telnet/SSH application.  Good in a pinch

SecureCRT – The popular SSH client for Windows.

Troubleshoot

Cisco Network Assistant -Useful GUI tool for managing Cisco’s SMB product line.

Wireshark – The defacto standard in packet sniffing.

Misc

Winagents TFTP – Useful for setting up a TFTP server in your network.  Runs as a Windows service and is ideal for backing up your network via TFTP.

Kixtart – Scripting language designed for login scripts.