Essential Network Tools For Site Management

IM Toolpad includes a powerful Toolkit that surprisingly gets ignored by some customers.

The toolkit contains all the essential network tools that will help you obtain information and diagnose common network problems with your website or hosting account.

The following tools are currently available...

• Ping - allows you check if a host is reachable on the network. Ping will also tell you the time required to send a packet to the host and get it back.
• Trace-route - Used to find the path (route) taken by the packets from one host computer to another. This is very useful for finding network problems and is often asked for by web hosting companies when you report a problem reaching your hosting account. A sample trace-route screen shot is shown below.
• DNS - is for converting a host name to an IP address or vice versa. For example, typing outage.softnik.com will return it's IP address. It will also display the actual reverse DNS entry for the IP address.
• DSBL - DSBL lists if an IP address is listed in any of the common Distributed Sender Blackhole Lists. DSBL contains IP addresses of servers that are malicious, configured incorrectly or have vulnerabilities that cause SPAM to be relayed through it. You should often check all the IP addresses associated with your web hosting account / server and make sure that they are not listed in a DSBL.
• MX Records - Mail exchanger records specify how the email for a domain is handled. You can check your domain names to find the MX records of that domain. Some domains may not have any MX records (those domains will not be able to accept any email).

• Domain Whois - Helps you find the records associated with a domain name. These include the registrant, expiry, creation date etc. Depending on the registrar, not all information will be always available. Set the Whois Server to Auto for best results.
• IP Whois - Similar to Domain whois except that it works for IP addresses. Use it to find the owner of an IP block. In many cases this will show the ISP.