Network & Internet Software

January 27th, 2009 by Tom

Best Free And Open Source Software

This article is part of a series of posts containing software that I’ve come to think of as being the best free and open-source ones around at the moment. Check the table of contents for the other articles in the series.

In this article I’d like to list some network and internet tools that deserve some attention. Anything from general every-day-use tools to more advanced analysis software goes in here. Here’s some of the better software out there:

BitMeter II: this free bandwidth meter allows you to visually monitor your internet connection by displaying a scrolling graph that shows your upload and download speed over time. The different colours on the graph represent your upload and download speeds, the display updates every second, and the current speeds are also displayed numerically in the lower part of the window. If you want to see historical data you can use the Statistics window to see what’s been going on over the last few hours, days or weeks. Go to the product page for a detailed overview of features.

FileZilla FTP Client & Server: the open-source client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. For a list of features, check out the website or, for more information, the wiki. The server software is an open-source FTP server supported by the same project. It supports FTP and FTP over SSL/TLS. If you’re using FTP, this is an application you’ll want to have installed for sure! I’m happily using it for years already now.

iPig (iOpus Private Internet Gateway): the iOpus Private Internet Gateway (iPIG) creates a secure “tunnel” that protects your inbound and outbound communications at any Wi-Fi hotspot or wired network. It’s extremely easy to setup and the iPig Server Express Edition, which is recommendable to install if you don’t want your traffic to go through their servers, is free for up to 5 users. If you’re the only one using it, that’s more than enough. I especially like how easy it is to setup a server and client.

Mozilla Firefox: an extremely popular open-source web browser. At the moment, Firefox has a recorded usage share of about 21%, making it the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer (around 68%). The developers of Firefox aimed to produce a browser that “just surfs the web” and delivers the “best possible browsing experience to the widest possible set of people.” Personally, I’m already using it for years and it’s truly great in features, speed, performance, security, flexibility and user-friendliness! I can heartily recommend it!

Mozilla Thunderbird: open-source e-mail and news client. Thunderbird offers a variety of ways for you to organize and display your folders, whether by favorites, recently viewed or folders containing unread messages. As always, you can also set up RSS and newsgroup folders to stay on top of news and your interests. Check out the website to get a complete overview of all features of this great piece of software. I’m using it for years already and I’m sticking to it. I especially like the junk e-mail handling features.

PuTTY: open-source client program for the SSH, Telnet and Rlogin network protocols. These protocols are all used to run a remote session on a computer, over a network. PuTTY implements the client end of that session: the end at which the session is displayed, rather than the end at which it runs. In really simple terms: you run PuTTY on a Windows machine, and tell it to connect to another machine. PuTTY opens a window to communicate with the other machine. It’s a small tool and great in many ways. If you’re running Windows and you’d rather want it to sit in the System Tray, check out PuTTYtray as well.

TCPView: free Windows Sysinternals tool that shows you detailed listings of all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, including the local and remote addresses and state of TCP connections. On newer Windows versions, TCPView also reports the name of the process that owns the endpoint. TCPView provides a more informative and conveniently presented subset of the Netstat program that ships with Windows.

Update (March, 14th): CurrPorts is a free tool by NirSoft that does exactly the same, but additionally allows for filters to be set: e.g. only show connections of a named process, udp/tcp, remote/local ports, IP addresses, etc. This is a huge advantage over TCPView when you want to inspect a certain application!

UltraVNC: is a powerful, easy to use and open-source software title that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. If you provide computer support, you can quickly access your customer’s computers from anywhere in the world and resolve helpdesk issues remotely.

Wireshark: an open-source network packet analyzer. A network packet analyzer will try to capture network packets and tries to display that packet data as detailed as possible. You could think of a network packet analyzer as a measuring device used to examine what’s going on inside a network cable, just like a voltmeter is used by an electrician to examine what’s going on inside an electric cable (but at a higher level, of course). In the past, such tools were either very expensive, proprietary, or both. However, with the advent of Wireshark, all that has changed. Wireshark is perhaps one of the best open source packet analyzers available today.

WebBug: a free program that lets you enter a URL, then displays exactly what it sends to the web server and, when the response is received, exactly what the web server sends back. This is a ‘fun’ program if you’re curious about the HTTP protocol, and is a useful debugging tool if you are trying to resolve a problem. It will handle the HTTP/1.1 version of the Web protocol in addition to the older HTTP/1.0 and HTTP 0.9, as well as conditional GETs. It can also be configured to be used with a proxy server. It also allows for the entry of custom headers so that users can test anything they like.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth: free tool that checks web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continuously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time. If you maintain any website, this is a great tool to use. Nobody wants to click on links going places that don’t exist anymore, also not your site’s visitors.