A.P. Lawrence

Cool Tools: Network View - a network node discovery tool

More Articles

I'm not the only one who maintains this company's network. The operations guy is pretty capable and doesn't mind setting up PCs - he enjoys it. Well, between me and him we had lost track of PC, printers, WAPs, routers, more routers and such like that. We needed a network discovery tool and we found a great one by Michael Welschenbach at http://www.networkview.com/.

Network View pings specific addresses, a subnet or a range of IP addresses you specify. You can add nodes manually if you like. It can also scan a range of ports or just the most common ones such as SMTP, telnet and FTP. Information collected includes IP address, MAC address, NIC manufacturer (see Troubleshooting network connections with arp http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/dharp.html ) and hostname. SNMP information is displayed as well: Network View comes with over 5000 object IDs and you can add more if you have your own. SNMP is not available for Win 98.

Once you have all this information it can be saved in a file and printed out as well. The default format include IP address, NETBios/host name and the manufacturer of each NIC. The nodes can be sorted in several ways such as IP or MAC address or NETBios/host name.

Network View can monitor status and up and down events and can configure local alerts (.wav files) and email alerts. Discovery and event log files are kept .

Once a node is discovered you can right click on it and startup a Telnet, FTP, HTTP or even a VNC session.

Of course I tried Network View on my own network. I was curious to see which ports were open on my SCO Unix server (an old, venerable 486 with 16MB RAM). I scanned ports 1-1000 and got some very curious results. Ports 1, 7, 9, 13, 19, 21, 23, 25, 37, 79, 110, 137, 139, 199, 210, 457, 512, 513, 514, 515, were all alive. This was rather surprising to me - so I wrote an article about it. Network View is not a complicated tool, but performs it function very well indeed. It's definetly going to be a part of the computer nerds toolkit. This tool is Windoes shareware (30 days/$59).

Comments /Reviews/dhnetworkview.html
DhNetworkView :

A nice tool that I have used on a Linux machine, can be found here: http://cheops-ng.sourceforge.net/

- Bruce Garlock

And of course there's always http://www.insecure.org/nmap/

--TonyLawrence

And if all else fails, manual documentation of network resources still works.

--BigDumbDinosaur

Well,assuming it was done and that you can trust it.. I'd rather scan.

--TonyLawrence


Well, one of us documents and one does not....

--Dirk the computer guy

---August 5, 2004

You guys never fail to fulfill the Computer Dork Stereotype...
--

Fri Sep 29 14:25:34 2006: Subject: Another free network discovery tool   anonymous
I use http://www.spiceworks.com spiceworks. Its a new network discovery and monitoring tool. It also does monitoring, trouble ticketing and reporting so it works well for my 150 node network. Plus its free. It doesn't do a ton of deep SNMP scanning, but seems to handle VOIP, HTTP, WMI, and SSH pretty well.



Mon Dec 4 19:04:29 2006: Subject:   anonymous
I am reasonably certain that the above comment about spiceworks was posted by spiceworks. We tried it on a 150 node network and it was absolute trash. Stick with the big guys



Add your comments

Why no "Digg this!" etc.?

Enter your email address for automatic notification of new posts here
(be sure to whitelist 'feedburner.com' if you use spam filtering)

/Reviews/dhnetworkview.html copyright August 2003 Dirk Hart All Rights Reserved

Have you tried Searching this site?

Unix/Linux/Mac OS X support by phone, email or on-site: Support Rates

This is a Unix/Linux resource website. It contains technical articles about Unix, Linux and general computing related subjects, opinion, news, help files, how-to's, tutorials and more. We appreciate comments and article submissions.

Publishing your articles here