Many times a week, sometimes many times a day, I rely on being able to do some quick informational type lookups on one or more IP’s. Be it trying to find out who owns a particular server or what link between me and the box is causing me connection issues. Over the years, I have relied heavily on http://www.samspade.org for all my IP related tools. It’s a great site, with all the tools I need to get all the information I’m looking for. The added benefit is that it’s not on my network, so the results provided give me an external view of the issue, as well as providing some level of anonymity.

SamSpade has been overloaded recently; not sure what’s going on, but during some periods of time, the site is barely accessible. This has led me to look at some alternative for those times when Sam is down. That’s when I came across http://www.geektools.com

At first glance, it doesn’t look like much, but they do provide two of the tools I use the most; WHOIS and Traceroute. But here’s where things are different. You are given the choice of running your Traceroute from over a hundred sites scattered across the globe. This is great to see if an issue is a result of a down box somewhere, or a bad router.

While SamSpade still has a few extra nice tools (such as the anonymous URL browser and URL decrypter), Geektools adds that extra level of accessibility for those times when Sam isn’t available…

While doing some troubleshooting on my Windows XP workstation at home, I had a need to determine what network connections my computer currently was using and what processes were attached to them. Sure, I could run ‘netstat’, but that will only tell me what connections I have. If I spot anything out of the ordinary, it doesn’t tell me what ‘process’ is using that connection. That’s when I hit Google and found this gem of a site, http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/utilities.shtml

The utility I actually needed was called TCPView, but the owner of this site has authored a slew of other very cool utilities, much like the ones I use everyday in a Linux environment.

Utilities like:

• Handle – This handy command-line utility will show you what files are open by which processes, and much more.
• RegMon – This monitoring tool lets you see all Registry activity in real-time. It works on all versions of WinNT/2K, Windows 9x/Me and Windows 64-bit.
• Process Explorer – Find out what files, registry keys and other objects processes have open, which DLLs they have loaded, and more. This uniquely powerful utility will even show you who owns each process.