Cool Tools: Network View - a network node discovery tool

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).