To be an effective network administrator, you have to be part diplomat (when interacting with managers, users, and other IT pros) and part mechanic (when dealing with malfunctioning software and systems). As with mechanics in other trades, you need a specific set of tools to diagnose and correct problems, and these tools can often be quite expensive. However, every once in a while, free tools come along -- and sometimes they're even pretty good. I recently stumbled across some invaluable networking tools from AnalogX, and I was thrilled to discover that the author is a programmer who offers them as freeware to contribute to the general good of techies everywhere. Although a number of networking tools are available from AnalogX, I am particularly fond of two: HyperTrace and NetStat Live. I am going to introduce these two tools and explain why I think they would make a valuable addition to the virtual toolbox of nearly every administrator. HyperTrace
One of the classic troubleshooting tools for network management is Traceroute. This tool allows you to identify the routing devices between two hosts and determine the time it takes a packet of data to travel between each host. This can be extremely valuable when a network link goes down because it helps you pinpoint where the problem is occurring (ISP, Frame Relay router, VPN server, etc.), especially if you periodically run a Traceroute when things are working so that you are familiar with the various "hops" a packet normally takes. Traceroute is built into both Windows (using the tracert command) and Unix/Linux systems (using the traceroute command). There are also online versions of Traceroute on sites such as GeekTools and expanded graphical versions such as VisualRoute. For the most part, administrators rely heavily on the command line version of Traceroute that comes with Windows and Linux/Unix. The main problem with this version is that it can be painfully slow. That's where AnalogX's HyperTrace comes in. This powerful tool is a small GUI program (Figure A) that provides the same functionality as Traceroute but produces results much faster.

Figure A

I ran a trace on the same host with both Traceroute and HyperTrace. For a simple trace on an internal site over a VPN, Traceroute took 17 seconds and HyperTrace took 10 seconds. On a trace of an external site (I used yahoo.com), Traceroute took 38 seconds and HyperTrace took seven seconds. By default, HyperTrace (like Traceroute) resolves IP addresses to host names. However, HyperTrace also gives you the option to not resolve host names and simply do a trace using IP addresses. This speeds things up dramatically. For example, my trace of yahoo.com took two seconds without resolving. To select this option, you simply click on the Config button at the bottom of the HyperTrace window. In the Configure dialog box (Figure B), you can enable or disable DNS Lookup and Packet Loss.

Figure B

If you enable the Packet Loss option, it will display the percentage of packets lost in the Loss column in the HyperTrace window. In my tests, this feature slowed down a trace significantly and didn't provide much value. When working with only IP addresses and without calculating packet loss, I found that HyperTrace produced results almost instantly.