Tools

Tool: Network Performance Toolkit

Internet users currently face a difficult problem: they are unable to complain effectively about application performance problems. Getting useable tools widely deployed can begin to help change this situation. These tools can make it easy for end-users to generate readable trouble reports that will be acted upon by the appropriate support staff. This eases the [...]

10Jun2008 | Joe Harris | 0 comments | Continued

Tool - Xobni

Xobni is the Outlook plug-in that saves you time finding email conversations, contacts and attachments.After a quick install, you’ll see the new Xobni toolbar appear in Outlook - and suddenly information will become much easier to find. When a new email arrives, the sender’s full communication history appears in the Xobni sidebar, including past conversations, [...]

YouTube: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

5May2008 | Joe Harris | 5 comments | Continued

Tools - Cisco-centric Open Source Exchange Community (COSI)

Looking for some specific Cisco tools that are Open Source and very usefull? Give COSI a look, there are a number of tools and scripts there that can benefit most every Network Engineer. Visit the COSI website and see if there is a tool or script there you can use:
COSI

1May2008 | Joe Harris | 0 comments | Continued

Cisco NX-OS Feature Navigator

Cisco NX-OS is a data center-class operating system built with modularity, resiliency, and serviceability at its foundation. The self-healing and highly modular design of Cisco NX-OS makes zero-impact operations a reality and enables exceptional operational flexibility.
Cisco NX-OS provides a robust and rich feature set that fulfills the routing, switching, and storage networking requirements of [...]

17Mar2008 | Joe Harris | 0 comments | Continued

Using a Customized HTTP Interface for Router Management

Many or most of you know that you can enable a Cisco router to function as an HTTP server using the ‘ip http server’ command. Once you do this you can open your web browser and browse to an ip address of the router and it will present you with a somewhat bland webpage for [...]

3Jan2008 | Joe Harris | 0 comments | Continued

SCARE - The Source Code Analysis Risk Evaluation

The Source Code Analysis Risk Evaluation project is a study to create a security complexity metric that will analyze source code and provide a realistic and factual representation of the potential of that source code to create a problematic binary. This metric will not say that the binary will be exploited nor does it do [...]

1Dec2007 | Joe Harris | 0 comments | Continued

Tool - hping

Wanna test your TCP/IP packet monkey skills? Well then you may like hping.
hping is a command-line oriented TCP/IP packet assembler/analyzer. The interface is inspired to the ping unix command, but hping isn’t only able to send ICMP echo requests. It supports TCP, UDP, ICMP and RAW-IP protocols, has a traceroute mode, the ability to send [...]

28Nov2007 | Joe Harris | 0 comments | Continued

Cain & Able

While I’m on the subject of tools, another good tool to look at is Cain & Able (http://www.oxid.it/projects.html) which is a somewhat grey/blackhat type tool. It has a specific section for brute-forcing Cisco PIX-MD5 and IOS-MD5 password as well as a section where you can type in a password and it will give you all [...]

14Nov2007 | Joe Harris | 0 comments | Continued

RANCID

No it’s not a acid rock band; it stands for Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ. RANCID monitors a router’s (or more generally a device’s) configuration, including software and hardware (cards, serial numbers, etc) and uses CVS (Concurrent Version System) or Subversion to maintain history of changes. RANCID does this by the very simple process [...]

14Nov2007 | Joe Harris | 0 comments | Continued

Cisco MIBs

Believe it or not but I frequently get asked about MIBs supported on a certain Cisco platform or certain revision of code…For instance, I had a customer just yesterday ask me if the PIX platform supported the same MIBs as his ISR router because he was having an issue with bandwidth utilization graphs in What’s Up [...]

2Nov2007 | Joe Harris | 0 comments | Continued

Cisco IntelliShield Alert Manager Service

Have you heard of the Cisco Security IntelliShield Alert Manager Service? If not then let me tell you about it….the service provides a comprehensive, cost-effective solution for delivering the intelligence organizations need to identify, prevent, and quickly mitigate IT attacks. It’s a customizable, Web-based threat and vulnerability alert service that allows security staff to easily [...]

30Oct2007 | Joe Harris | 0 comments | Continued

WAN Emulation Toolkit

When I give WAAS demo’s to customers and partners alike, I typically use a standard network topology to keep my demo kit easy to administer but also the demo kit topology mimics most enterprises branch design connectivity options where there is a branch office connected back to the head end/data center. One of the major [...]

28Oct2007 | Joe Harris | 5 comments | Continued

Network Topology Icons

Ever wanted to use those cool icons in your Visio diagram like they used to use in Packet Magazine before it was discontinued in Sept 2006? or have you ever wanted to use an exact replica of the physical hardware in a diagram for management? Or maybe even wanted to use a different color of [...]

27Oct2007 | Joe Harris | 0 comments | Continued

HTTP Troubleshooting Tool

Many times throughout the day, I get tasked with helping customers trace and troubleshoot HTTP issues related to their firewall implementations. Some these issues may be related to application layer protocol inspection features that the ASA/PIX provide and the customer may or may not have enabled. On other occasions it could be issues with how [...]

24Oct2007 | Joe Harris | 2 comments | Continued

BackTrack - Pen Test Tool

Pen Test tool BackTrack is the most Top rated linux live distribution focused on penetration testing. With no installation whatsoever, the analysis platform is started directly from the CD-Rom and is fully accessible within minutes. It’s evolved from the merge of the two wide spread distributions Whax and Auditor Security Collection. By joining forces and [...]

23Oct2007 | Joe Harris | 3 comments | Continued

3 New Tools from SolarWinds

Call it an early Christmas gift, call it payback for all that good network karma you’ve built up, call it whatever you want. The fact is, we think you’ll love our free network management tools.
And you wouldn’t be alone…SolarWinds is proud to announce that our free tools are now used by more than one million [...]

18Oct2007 | Joe Harris | 1 comment | Continued

Yersinia - Pen Test Tool

This little nugget was sent to me by Joshua Walton, its called Yersinia and Yersinia is a network tool designed to take advantage of some weakeness in different network protocols. It pretends to be a solid framework for analyzing and testing deployed networks and systems.
***NOTE***
Running Yersinia for illegitimate or illegal purposes is not supported or recommended [...]

12Oct2007 | Joe Harris | 1 comment | Continued

Blue Console

I got one of these today…one of the coolest gadgets I’ve seen in a long time. No more hassling with console cables that aren’t long enough and remembering the stupid usb-serial adapter every time- just plug it into the router and walk away. I saw it working on a treo650 & Blackjack today- consoled into [...]

1Oct2007 | Joe Harris | 8 comments | Continued