[comp.protocols.tcp-ip] Survey of TCP/IP Management Tools

jon@CS.UCL.AC.UK.UUCP (05/12/88)

I am conducting a survey of tools available for TCP/IP
internetwork management that are in the public domain,
or distributable freely, if with notice or whatever.

I may include a list of some of the sorts of
non-public domain tools that exist for comparison (e.g. some BSD 
handy things like rdist etc).

I will collate answers and forward to this list when
a reasonable set is accumulated.

So far, the kind of tools I am thinking of fall loosely into
three categories:

A: Configuration management:
e.g. UCL have a (n)awk based account management tool, that generates
accounts, password files, mail aliases , nfs mount table parameters
and so on.

Programs for allocating addresses and names safely, would fall  into
this category. Programs for checking routing set ups for consistency
might also go here.

Domain name test suites might go here too.

Programs for gathering traffic matrices fall into this category - and
some network dimensioning tools might be handy (help answer
where do i cut my ethernet type questions).

B: Fault Detection:
e.g. We have a version of ping that is driven by knowledge of
the topology, (but does not use source route or record, unfortunately)
and can therefore track where a link is down in a path. This is
combined with a telnet level ping, to say what the state of
any host is at the end of a path...it has a termcap driven
graphic display...

C: Performance management:
e.g. tcpdump type programs that allow non-intrusive
sensible analysis of protocols as they operate.
e.g. traffic generators for UDP/TCP etc


Note that I am interested mainly in collecting small tools that
may be plugged together in a nice fashion rather than monolithic
be all and end all systems, and I am biased towards simple existing
network solutions - programs that depend on the more sophisticated
features in gateways or hosts are no use, since all heterogeneous 
networks are lowest common denominator by defn.

I would prefer not to restrict the list to Unix based tools, though
I know shareware tends to come from that domain more than others.

if answers could be of the form it would help:

A/B/C	name 	OS 	description 	Anon-FTP?	Restrictions