[c-nsp] Top 10 Network Engineering Tools

[Ed Ravin]

On Mon, Jan 28, 2008 at 12:22:51PM -0800, Joseph Jackson wrote:
> Myself and a coworker are trying to get together a list of the top ten tools
> any network engineer shouldn't be without.  We're looking for vendor neutral
> tools.  So what do you all think are the most haves?

I recently discovered Scamper:

  http://www.wand.net.nz/scamper/scamper-cvs-20070523i.tar.gz

I use it to detect the maximum MTU size at each hop along a connection.
Good for troubleshooting path MTU discovery problems.
 
Having Netflow up and running on your network is an important tool,
for problem diagnostics, performance measurement, forensics, billing,
and more.

Another handy tool is ngrep, like tcpdump but it only prints packets
that match a particular pattern in the data.

I'd also like to put in a word for tcptraceroute, which is like regular
traceroute but via TCP so it can often give you extra information about
hosts behind firewalls since the TCP packets make it all the way to the
end host.