Tool Box

This last weekend, I heard a tool box open somewhere in the neighborhood so I had to investigate. Nothing gathers men quite like the opening of a Newcastle or the opening of a tool box. My next door neighbor was fixin’ to work on his car. He looked a little confused, but instead of asking him what was wrong, I looked over at his toolbox. Yep, that told me all I needed to know. Hard to fix a ride with two finishing hammers, stud finder and a interchangeable bit head screw driver that was stamped, “Network World Top Dog” (I think he stole that from me…) Our tools define us as field engineers. If an network engineer pops open his laptop and all I see is server admin tools, then I start to question their ability. Networking folks need networking tools. I use a bunch of open source tools like Wireshark, NMAP, Teraterm…etc, a few I coded up myself and one commercial grade tool. That tool is Solar Winds Engineer’s Tool Set. I have been using and upgrading Solar Winds Engineering Tool Set for many years. This is really a collection of around 50 tools from discovery all the way down to vendor specific tools. No useless tools in the mix. I have used all of these tools and ALWAYS use at least two on every call I go on. For example; The Switch Port Mapper tool has really saved so much time for me tracking down users. I used to do that with a perl script, now it is so much easier. I just finished using the Netflow Config and Real Time Tracker to chase down some hackers in my darknet. It worked great! The thing I REALLY like the best about Solar Winds is the stuff I can not see, the software coding. Solar Winds gives me a very high degree of results and visibility in my network with little CPU/RAM performance hit. This is a full network management package designed for the portable field engineer. I have yet to find an application that conflicts with it in my normal field use. I could not possibly give any application a higher endorsement then I do Solar Winds ETS. Many times I have plugged up to a projector for a presentation and without fail, when Solar Winds ETS boots up, someone always says something about it. Like Bill Dance seeing inside of Roland Martin’s tackle box… Jimmy Ray Purser