This guide shows how to install and configure Smokeping on Debian Etch to monitor network latency. From the Smokeping web site: "SmokePing is a deluxe latency measurement tool. It can measure, store and display latency, latency distribution and packet loss. SmokePing uses RRDtool to maintain a longterm data-store and to draw pretty graphs, giving up to the minute information on the state of each network connection."

For some time I have been looking for a good way to let my computer discover the Windows network and mount shares on demand. After trying the kioslaves in the desktop of my choice (KDE) and the FUSE programs Fusesmb and SmbNetFs, I was not really satisfied. There had to be a way to let my computer discover all the workgroups/domains, the hosts and the shares, and mount a share on a hosts on demand.

Zabbix is a solution for monitoring applications, networks, and servers. With Zabbix, you can monitor multiple servers at a time, using a Zabbix server that comes with a web interface (that is used to configure Zabbix and holds the graphs of your systems) and Zabbix agents that are installed on the systems to be monitored. The Zabbix agents deliver the desired data to the Zabbix server. This tutorial shows how you can install the Zabbix server and agent on a Debian Etch system.

Bonding is the same as port trunking. In the following I will use the word bonding because practically we will bond interfaces as one. Bonding allows you to aggregate multiple ports into a single group, effectively combining the bandwidth into a single connection. Bonding also allows you to create multi-gigabit pipes to transport traffic through the highest traffic areas of your network. For example, you can aggregate three megabits ports into a three-megabits trunk port. That is equivalent with having one interface with three megabytes speed.

The life of a systems or network administrator requires us to maintain an expansive understanding of our network infrastructure to more effectively manage it. Amidst volumes of complex data that some IT problems present and network management is no exception to these complications. Visual tools allow us to better see trends and make sense of the macro view of our networks. Ntop, nBox, nProbe are just the right FOSS tools that can help us gain greater insight.

This tutorial will guide you through installation and configuration of Lintrack, a GNU/Linux distribution specialized in networking tasks. We will give two LANs access to the internet along with DHCP and DNS cache servers, and then we will connect our networks using OpenVPN in bridging mode. You should be running all these in well under an hour, thanks to the unified configuration interface of Lintrack.