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Is your Net connection slow? Ever wonder what the hell’s going down the wire? Here are five free and effective tools to diagnose network traffic issues.

If you’ve been using Linux for a while, no doubt you’re already amazed with the amount of software there is for you to use, for free. My own last count revealed in excess of three thousand applications ready to install and use. But how do we find the gems?

Look no further, because here they are. These are tools I use on a daily basis to both diagnose my own Internet connections and network performance in remote hosts. You can’t claim to be a network management expert if you haven’t used at least 5 of these tools, but you don’t need to be an expert to use them either, because they’re brutally easy to use.

The net essentials in our toolbox

Let’s explore the first three tools in our toolset. They’re powerful and easy enough for you to get an overview of what’s going on with your Net connection.

KSysGuard: view aggregate network traffic

My favorite, in all aspects, is KSysGuard. With it, you can plot network usage for all your network interfaces (even though in 99% of all cases, there’s only one network interface, and it’s named eth0). Take a look at this screenshot:

It’s not black magic. It’s a sheet divided in rectangles, where you can drag and drop the sensors listed on the left to any of the empty rectangles on the right. When you place any of the sensors on the left, KSysGuard starts plotting.

Bonus points for KSysGuard: you can keep tabs on a remote machine via SSH. All you need to do is:

• create an account on the remote machine,
• install a small program named ksysguardd (which you can find after installing KSysGuard in the path /usr/bin/ksysguardd) on the remote machine,
• set up passwordless SSH authentication for that account,
• connect with KSysGuard to the remote machine using File -> Connect to machine…

The ksysguardd program is self-contained so you can be confident you won’t be introducing security issues.

Here’s an overview sheet plotted from a remote machine (in this case, this Web host):

Here’s another, showing my MythTV PVR and backup machine:

Oh, did I mention KSysGuard can plot much, much more than just network traffic? I guess not, but the screenshots speak for themselves. Oh, and the screens are fully customizable, down to the colors used to plot the graphs. You can save the worksheets for later usage as well.

To install this tool, use your distribution’s favorite package manager, and look for KSysGuard or the kdeadmin package.

In the next page, we’ll explore the different uses of netstat.

(May I respectfully request, if you like this article, that you use one of the links right below to submit it to your favorite news site?)

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 8:15 and is filed under Free software, Information security, Linux, Networking, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.