Social Source Commons

BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) is an implementation of the Domain Name System (DNS) protocols and provides an openly redistributable reference implementation of the major components of the Domain Name System, including:

* a Domain Name System server (named)
* a Domain Name System resolver library
* tools for verifying the proper operation of the DNS server

ChilliSpot is an open source captive portal or wireless LAN access point controller. It is used for authenticating users of a wireless LAN. It supports web based login which is today's standard for public HotSpots. Authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) is handled by your favorite radius server.

We have elaborated an on-line simulator with which you can experience browsing the web with low bandwidth and compare it with the bandwidth you are used to.
To make use of it select the website you want to test, then select the bandwidth you want to simulate, and click "simulate". You will be presented with two pages: one at full speed and one at the limited speed. You can then compare the two."

Inspired by EtherPEG (though, not owning an Apple Macintosh, I've never actually seen it in operation), Driftnet is a program which listens to network traffic and picks out images from TCP streams it observes. Fun to run on a host which sees lots of web traffic.

Based on the OpenWRT project, the Freifunk firmware brings easy OLSR support to MIPS-based consumer access points, such as the Linksys WRT54G / WRT54GS / WAP54G, Siemens SE505, and others. By simply flashing one of these APs with the Freifunk firmware, you can rapidly build a self-forming OLSR mesh. Freifunk is not currently available for x86 architecture machines. It is maintained by Sven Ola of the Freifunk wireless group in Berlin. You can download the firmware from freifunk.net

Iperf is a tool to measure maximum TCP bandwidth, allowing the tuning of various parameters and UDP characteristics. Iperf reports bandwidth, delay jitter, datagram loss.

IPTraf is a console-based network statistics utility for Linux. It gathers a variety of figures such as TCP connection packet and byte counts, interface statistics and activity indicators, TCP/UDP traffic breakdowns, and LAN station packet and byte counts.

Kismet is an 802.11 layer2 wireless network detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system. Kismet will work with any wireless card which supports raw monitoring (rfmon) mode, and can sniff 802.11b, 802.11a, and 802.11g traffic.

MacStumbler is a utility to display information about nearby 802.11b and 802.11g wireless access points. It is mainly designed to be a tool to help find access points while traveling, or to diagnose wireless network problems. Additionally, MacStumbler can be used for "wardriving", which involves co-ordinating with a GPS unit while traveling around to help produce a map of all access points in a given area.

NEC2 stands for Numerical Electromagnetics Code (version 2) and is a free antenna modeling package. NEC2 lets you build an antenna model in 3D, and then analyzes the antenna's electromagnetic response. It was developed more than ten years ago and has been compiled to run on many different computer systems. NEC2 is particularly effective for analyzing wire-grid models, but also has some surface patch modeling capability.

ntop is a network traffic probe that shows the network usage, similar to what the popular top Unix command does. ntop is based on libpcap and it has been written in a portable way in order to virtually run on every Unix platform and on Win32 as well.

ntop users can use a a web browser (e.g. netscape) to navigate through ntop (that acts as a web server) traffic information and get a dump of the network status. In the latter case, ntop can be seen as a simple RMON-like agent with an embedded web interface.

Secure shell

OpenWrt is described as a Linux distribution for embedded devices.

Instead of trying to create a single, static firmware, OpenWrt provides a fully writable filesystem with package management. This frees you from the application selection and configuration provided by the vendor and allows you to customize the device through the use of packages to suit any application. For developer, OpenWrt is the framework to build an application without having to build a complete firmware around it; for users this means the ability for full customization, to use the device in ways never envisioned.

A Free Telnet/SSH Client

Radio Mobile uses a digital terrain elevation model for the calculation of coverage, indicating received signal strength at various points along the path. It automatically builds a profile between two points in the digital map showing the coverage area and first Fresnel zone. During the simulation, it checks for line of sight and calculates the Path Loss, including losses due to obstacles. It is possible to create networks of different topologies, including net master/ slave, point-to-point, and point-to-multipoint.

The Shoreline Firewall, more commonly known as "Shorewall", is a high-level tool for configuring Netfilter. You describe your firewall/gateway requirements using entries in a set of configuration files. Shorewall reads those configuration files and with the help of the iptables utility, Shorewall configures Netfilter to match your requirements.

Squid is a caching proxy for the Web supporting HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more. It reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. Squid has extensive access controls and makes a great server accelerator. It runs on Unix and Windows and is licensed under the GNU GPL.

Free software for anonymous Internet communication.

The Wifidog project is premier Open Source captive portal solution. It was designed primarily for wireless community groups, but increasingly caters to various other WirelessCommunityModels as well.

Online tool for calculating link budget for wireless networks.