Win : eToolz — GUI for ping, traceroute, WHOIS

eToolz is a nifty GUI tool that allows you to perform a number of network queries: DNS, ping, traceroute, WHOIS, mail-check, HTTP-header, time (NTP), Google pagerank, top level domains and port numbers.

For some of these queries, you would usually go to the command prompt in Windows; for example, the DNS query would be just nslookup. eToolz allows you to query for A, PTR, NS, MX, and SOA records. The Ping tool offers the options pause, bytes, timeout and count, and traceroute lets you configure the number of hops and the timeout. Even though eToolz is a standalone program (it doesn’t have to be installed), it will store the IP addresses, host names, etc. that you enter, so the next time you want to ping a certain host, you can just select it from a drop-down-list. I think, in most cases, you will be faster with eToolz than with the command prompt tools because it can save you some typing exercises.

You probably know that WHOIS provides domain registration information. Mail-Check allows you to find out information about an email address; for example, which SMTP server receives the mail for this address. An HTTP header query can be useful if you want to gather information about a Web server. For example, you can use this to verify that I am running this blog on a Linux box, even though I am writing here for Windows admins. 😉

Time allows you to query an NTP server of your choice to get the exact time. Pagerank will tell you how Google values a certain web site and the Lists tab provides information about top level domains and TCP/UDP port numbers. If you ever wanted to know the top level domain of “South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands”, you can use eToolz to figure out that it is .”gs”. Searching for port numbers might be more useful for sys admins. Just type in the protocol name, for example ‘http’, and eToolz will tell you what ports are involved. There are more than you may think.

Just click on “Sprache/Language” after you have launched it for the first time. The link below points directly to the tool. Note that it was compressed in the rar format. You can use 7-zip to uncompress it.

Download

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