10 great free downloads for your network

Got a small network, home network, medium-size network – even an enterprise network – and want to get the most out of it? Then I’ve got good news for you: 10 free pieces of software that can make your network easier to use, troubleshoot and maintain. These freebies will help everyone from networking pros to networking newbies and everyone in between.

Got a small network, home network, medium-size network — even an enterprise network — and want to get the most out of it? Then I’ve got good news for you: 10 free pieces of software that can make your network easier to use, troubleshoot and maintain. These freebies will help everyone from networking pros to networking newbies and everyone in between.

There’s plenty here for you — great free tools for keeping your network secure; creating a quick, navigable network map; scanning networks and putting together a list of all connected devices; checking to see if your servers are up and running; even designing networks and more.

Note that I’m leaving out extremely popular and well-known free downloads, such as the Ethereal network protocol analyzer or Wireshark and am concentrating instead on lesser-known downloads.

And as a bonus, I’m including a review of an extra, for-pay, try-before-you-buy download that can help your network as well.

1. Network Magic

If you’re looking for a simple, free, all-in-one network management tool for a small peer-to-peer network, this is the one to get. It handles all the basic network chores, including adding new devices to the network, fixing broken network connections, setting up wireless encryption and protection, sharing printers and folders, reporting on the state of the security of each PC, and much more. Wizards guide you through all these tasks and others. If you’ve got network experience, the wizards may or may not be useful, but those with moderate or less network experience will certainly find them helpful. But even if you’re a network pro, there’s a lot in this simple program you’ll find worthwhile.

For example, the network map, pictured nearby, displays every device connected to your network, shows whether it’s online or offline, and displays details about each, including the computer name, IP address, MAC address, operating system being used, shared folders, and system information such as its processor and RAM. It also lets you change the machine name, and it displays alerts about each device, such as if it isn’t protected properly. Overall, it’s far superior to Windows Vista’s Network Map.

The software’s Status Center is also useful. It displays overall information about your network, such as whether there are any problems with overall security or with an individual PC. It also lets you troubleshoot connections, shows whether there are any intruders on the network, and displays information about wireless protection.

Parents will appreciate some of Network Magic’s features. For example, the software can monitor the use of any individual PC on the network for the Web sites it visits, the times the computer is online and which programs are being used, and then mail a daily report about it to an e-mail address. So it’s ideal for parents who want to keep track of their kids’ computer use. There’s much more as well, including a bandwidth tester to show you your current Internet broadband speed.

Note that there are both paid and free versions of the software. The free version includes most basic features, such as repairing broken connections, issuing security alerts, monitoring network activity and the Network Map. The paid version, which costs from $24 to $40 (depending on how many PCs are on your network), delivers daily reports of Internet activity, supports remote access to your network’s files and includes other advanced features.

When you install this program, you may need to tell your firewall to let this application access your network and the Internet.

2. Spiceworks IT Desktop

This freebie can help small or one-person shops with small and medium-size networks, although the complexity of its interface and some anomalies don’t make it particularly useful for home networks. It’s an all-in-one network inventory and management tool with a surprising number of features for a free piece of software.

The program will inventory your network and provide information about each device on it. It goes further than Network Magic and provides a significant amount of detail about each PC and device, including free and used disk space, antivirus software being used, problems on the device (such as server connection errors), and other information, as you can see in the nearby figure. It will even provide an inventory of the software installed on each PC, in quite a bit of detail, finding not just popular applications such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Reader, but lesser-known ones such as the FileZilla FTP client. I discovered, however, that it had a more difficult time than Network Magic finding all of my network devices; you may need to fine-tune permissions and log-ins to get it to work properly.

Note that when you install this program, you may need to tell your firewall to let this application access your network and the Internet.

The program includes a variety of other tools, such as easy access to ping and traceroute functions. And it attempts to be a help desk application as well. You can create help tickets with it, assign the ticket to others or yourself, and include due dates, priorities and so on. It’s certainly no replacement for a full-blown help-desk application, but for a small office with a small IT staff, you can’t argue with free.

Because the program doesn’t always easily find all devices attached to the network, and it has some anomalies (some antivirus software may flag one of this software’s components as a virus, for example), this isn’t a perfect application. But it’s free and simple to set up — and for that reason alone, it’s worth the download.

3. NetLimiter Monitor

There are also for-pay versions of this software available. NetLimiter Lite costs $8.95 to $16.95, depending on the number of licenses; and NetLimiter Pro costs $14.95 to $29.95, depending on the number of licenses.

What’s the biggest problem on many small networks? Bandwidth hoggers — applications that suck up all or most of the available Internet and network bandwidth. Typically, it’s tough or impossible to track down which applications or PCs are using all that bandwidth and harder still to do anything about it.

That’s where NetLimiter comes in. It monitors bandwidth use so that you can identify the hoggers. The free version of the software, though, won’t let you actually set bandwidth limits. For that, you’ll need to buy one of the paid versions. The paid versions let you set bandwidth limits, including total amount of data downloaded or uploaded, on a per-application or per-connection basis. You can fine-tune it quite a bit, for example, by setting different limits for uploading and downloading.

There’s a lot more to this application as well, including a firewall, bandwidth monitor and other functions. This isn’t the easiest program to use — at first, it seems as if there’s no way to limit the bandwidth for any application. To do it, you need to click the Grants tab at the bottom of the screen and then, for the application you want to limit, click the Grant column, enter a value for the bandwidth limit, and click the check box.

There are three different versions of this program, starting with the free version, which only monitors network use and won’t let you limit bandwidth use. The Lite version will let you set limits but won’t do much more, and the Pro version adds a slew of features, including a firewall, scheduler and more.

4. Network Notepad

Designing a network, or keeping a clear record of one you already have, can be an exceedingly frustrating task. Most drawing programs don’t have adequate tools for creating network diagrams. And as for pencil and paper, the less said about them, the better.

If you’re looking for a tool to help you design your network or keep visual track of one you already have, you’ll want to get Network Notepad. With it, you can design your network and draw schematics that are more than flat documents — they’re live and include links so that you could, for example, Telnet into any device on your network just by clicking on a button on the diagram.

It comes with a palette of icons for routers, servers, printers, boxes, hubs, modems and other network devices. To design your network, choose graphics from the palette and drag them onto your diagram, and connect the devices using a set of drawing tools. You then define the properties of each device such as giving them names and IP addresses. You can also import a host file, and Network Notepad will automatically populate the devices with the right IP addresses.

You can also program five buttons to launch programs when a device is clicked upon that will then act on the device. So you could click on a device to ping it, for example. Your diagram becomes a live, interactive drawing.

5. Advanced IP Scanner

This little free utility is a great way to get a quick list of all the devices connected to your network, listed by IP address, along with information about each. It does a lightning-fast scan of all IP addresses in a range that you specify, then specifies whether a device is present at each address. For each device, it lists the status, the machine name, NetBIOS information, ping information and MAC address.

The program will do more than just scan your network. It also gives you a set of tools that lets you shut down PCs remotely, use the “Wake on LAN” feature for any PC whose network card supports that capability, and connect to remote PCs via Radmin, if it’s installed. You can also apply some operations, such as shutting down remote PCs, to a group of computers, not just individual ones.

6. Advanced Net Tools (ANT)

Here’s the Swiss Army Knife of network utilities, and you won’t have to pay a penny for it. This freebie puts a whole suite of tools at your fingertips, including ones for conducting ports scans, DNS lookups and pings, and scanning for network shares, checking on routing tables and more.

The security modules are especially useful for quick-and-dirty network scans. There’s a network port scanner that can scan all computers on your network and report on their open ports, and a share scanner that reports on all the shared drives on your network.

The information modules are also useful. With them, you can examine your routing table and add and delete entries in it. You can also find out what IP addresses are available to be assigned on your network. Other modules do advanced DNS lookups, let you view all the network adapters connected to computers on the network and add and remove their IP addresses, and more.

7. DreamSys Server Monitor

Want to know if your servers are up and running? Then get this utility that will monitor whether your servers are alive and, if they’re not, take a variety of actions that you can choose. At a specified interval, it will check your servers to see if they’re still running. You can also check the servers manually at any time.

You can also tell the program to take a variety of actions when it identifies a problem server, including sending an e-mail, rebooting the machine, starting a service, playing a sound or running a command. It can also play a sound or run a command when the server is running.

Be aware that it can be a bit confusing setting up the program to monitor a server. If you’re going to monitor a server via TCP/IP, when you add a new server to monitor, make sure to click the Options tab and type in the TCP port you want to monitor. If you don’t, you’ll get an error message.

8. NetBrute Scanner

A network is only as secure as its weakest link — or, in many cases, shared folders or mistakenly open ports. Trying to find all the shared folders and open ports on a network — even a small one — can be a difficult, time-consuming task.

This free suite of three simple security tools will put your network through a basic security check, looking for shared resources and open ports. As a bonus, you can also use it to test the security of any Web servers on your network.

You can check for shared folders and resources, as well as open ports, on any individual PC on the network by using its network name or IP address. You can also scan an entire range of IP addresses, although I found that feature to be somewhat flaky; it didn’t find all the PCs on my network. However, scanning individual PCs worked fine.

The program lists all shared resources and, better yet, lets you connect to those resources and browse them from the program as well. The program also scans the PCs on the network for open TCP ports, so you’ll be able to find out what Web servers, FTP servers, Telnet resources and the like are installed. More important, it will show you where your port vulnerabilities are.

The final utility in the suite checks the Web servers on your network and sees whether it can break into them using a “dictionary attack” by trying combinations of usernames and passwords to gain access to the webmaster’s account.

There are a variety of technical limitations to this program; before using it, it’s a good idea to check out its details. Still, it’s free, it’s simple, and it’s fast, and because of that, more than worth a try.

9. Technitium MAC Address Changer