Network Monitoring in Linux: using Wireshark

Wireshark is the world's most famous network protocol analyzer. It is used as a standard  in many organization.

Wireshark has a rich feature set which includes the following:

• Deep inspection of hundreds of protocols, with more being added all the time
• Live capture and offline analysis
• Standard three-pane packet browser
• Multi-platform: Runs on Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and many others
• Captured network data can be browsed via a GUI, or via the TTY-mode TShark utility
• The most powerful display filters in the industry
• Rich VoIP analysis
• Read/write many different capture file formats: tcpdump (libpcap), Pcap NG, Catapult DCT2000, Cisco Secure IDS iplog, Microsoft Network Monitor, Network General Sniffer® (compressed and uncompressed), Sniffer® Pro, and NetXray®, Network Instruments Observer, NetScreen snoop, Novell LANalyzer, RADCOM WAN/LAN Analyzer, Shomiti/Finisar Surveyor, Tektronix K12xx, Visual Networks Visual UpTime, WildPackets EtherPeek/TokenPeek/AiroPeek, and many others
• Capture files compressed with gzip can be decompressed on the fly
• Live data can be read from Ethernet, IEEE 802.11, PPP/HDLC, ATM, Bluetooth, USB, Token Ring, Frame Relay, FDDI, and others (depending on your platform)
• Decryption support for many protocols, including IPsec, ISAKMP, Kerberos, SNMPv3, SSL/TLS, WEP, and WPA/WPA2
• Coloring rules can be applied to the packet list for quick, intuitive analysis
• Output can be exported to XML, PostScript®, CSV, or plain text 

In the next post i will write  on how does WIRESHARK works and its advance uses.

How to optimize Web browsing speed in windows?

On my computer the web browser is the most used application second only to my e-mail program and instant messenger. For society in general, the web browser is the most used application on the computer.

Speeding up Internet Explorer

Microsoft has made sure that Internet Explorer follows Internet standards by allowing you and your browser to download only two files at a time from any server. If you visit a web page with a lot of images and required files, such as CSS styles and JavaScript, you can easily end up with a scenario where your web browser has to make more than 40 requests to the web server to download all the files and then assemble the web page. Requesting only two of these 40 files at a time is going to be a lot slower than downloading, say, 10 of them at a time.

By tweaking hidden registry values, you can direct Internet Explorer to break Internet standards and download more than just two files at a time. Modifying this setting is simple to do, but be careful; the standards police will be after you. Follow these steps to speed up IE:

1. Click the Start button, type regedit in the Search box, and then press Enter.
2. After Registry Editor loads, navigate through HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings.
3. Right-click in an open space and create a new DWORD key
    Type MaxConnectionsPerServer as the name of the new DWORD key.
   Right-click this key and select Modify.
   Set the base to Decimal and enter a value greater than 2, 
   
   
   
   
    Create a new DWORD key and type MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server as the name
   Right-click this key and select Modify.Set the base to Decimal and enter the new value. Use the same value as used in step 6. Click OK when you are finishedExit Registry Editor and reboot your computer
   
   
   
   

   Speeding up Firefox

   Firefox suffers from the same limitation on file downloads imposed on it as Internet Explorer by Internet standards. Thankfully, there is an easy way to modify the number of simultaneous downloads in Firefox as well. Additionally, you can do a few other things to speed up Firefox, such as reducing delays and enabling parallel downloads (which Firefox calls pipelining). Instead of editing the registry, you can use a cool hidden feature in Firefox to hack the raw configuration settings built right into the browser. Follow these steps to speed up browsing with Firefox:
   Open a copy of Firefox if you do not already have it open.
5. Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter.
   
   
   Scroll down the list and locate network. http://www.max-connections-per-server,
6. 
   
   
   
   1. Right-click this setting and select Modify. Enter a higher value, such as 15, and press OK.
   2. Enable parallel downloads, which is known as pipelining in Firefox. Scroll further down the list and locate network.http.pipelining.
   3. Right-click this setting and select Toggle.
   4. Scroll down and modify network.http.pipelining.maxrequests. Set this to a value of at least 15 and press OK.

      Tip

      If you use a proxy server to connect to the Internet, you will also want to toggle network.http.proxy.pipelining.

   5. Let's reduce the paint delays in Firefox. But be careful with this one; according to the Mozilla Foundation, if you have a slower machine, this tweak can actually slow down Firefox. Right-click anywhere on the configuration screen and select New and then Integer.
   6. Enter nglayout.initialpaint.delay in the name box and then 0 in the value boxes that pop up.
   7. Close and restart Firefox to activate your new optimized settings.