IT Trenches:

public network

Jan 6 2009   4:45PM GMT

Swiss-army knife for public network testing



Posted by: Troy Tate
toolkit, tools, testing, connectivity testing, website, dns, ping, tracert, icmp, tcp, udp, public network, ssh, SSL, cryptography, crypto, crypto testing, hash, typosquatting

Sometimes it is necessary to test connectivity outside of your private company network. There are several resources I use. I will share a couple of those with you in this posting.

One of my favorite and most frequently used sites is Network-Tools. This website allows you to test Traceroute, PIng, Domain Name Server (DNS) lookup, Whois, and DNS record lookups. This is an excellent resource like DNSTools or DNSStuff.

Another site with useful public internet testing tools is Serversniff.net. You can use this site to perform TCP pings rather than the standard ICMP pings. There is also a step-ping test. This provides the ability to have increasing ping packet sizes to see if there is a bottleneck somewhere before the tested host. There are lots of other tools available on this website. I recommend you check it out and see which offer value to you in your support activities.

Unfortunately, these tools only work from the public internet. You will not be able to test hosts on your private network, but hey, shouldn’t you already have some other testing tools in your toolbag for the private network? I’m sure I will describe more tools as the year moves on.

Thanks for reading & let’s practice safe networking out there! Please feel free to leave comments for other readers so they can adequately support their networks.