Five handy network apps for your portable toolkit

By Jack Wallen September 10, 2012, 6:53 AM PDT

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Five handy network apps for your portable toolkit

Introduction

ntNOTE: If you’d prefer to view this information as a blog post, check out this entry in our Five Apps blog.

ntHaving all your networking tools in one place certainly makes your job easier. Luckily, there are plenty of networking tools that require zero installation and can fit on a USB flash drive. Here are five handy portable network tools that you can add to your on-the-go toolkit.

ConnectionMonitoring

ntConnectionMonitoring is a simple tool that allows you to monitor incoming and outgoing socket connections. With this connection information at hand, you can see whether any unwanted traffic is coming into a machine. And because this app is portable, you don’t have to bother with installing the tool — you’ll always have what you need right there.

ConnectionMonitoring

ntConnectionMonitoring scans current connections and then displays the following: Local address/port, remote address/port, TCP UDP protocol/status of those connections.

TCPView

ntTCPView is like Netstat with a power boost. With this portable tool, you can view a detailed listing and the current state of all TCP and UDP endpoint connections, as well as the process name running each endpoint.

TCPView

ntThis tool also contains a command-line version, Tcpvcon, which offers the same features as Netstat.

DNS Benchmark

ntDNS Benchmark allows you to do exactly what the name implies — benchmark your DNS servers. You can easily determine whether your nameservers are the cause of your networking problems.

DNS Benchmark

ntDNS Benchmark can monitor up to 200 DNS servers and report on their status. You can use a simple configuration file to configure the specific DNS servers you want checked.

Pale Moon Portable

ntPale Moon Portable is based on the minimalist version of Firefox but is far lighter in weight and far faster in performance. Pale Moon (the creators of the browser) claims a 25% speed increase over Firefox.

Pale Moon Portable

ntYou will find that some Firefox features aren’t in Pale Moon. The major missing features are accessibility and parental control. Otherwise, you can expect a full-featured browsing experience in a very mobile package.

EasyPHP

ntEasyPHP allows you to carry around a complete portable WAMP stack on a stick. This tool is mostly useful for developers, but anyone who needs a portable Web server can benefit from having this available.

EasyPHP

ntEasyPHP bundles all the usual WAMP tools (Apache, MySQL, PHP) as well as the PhpMyAdmin tool for managing the databases on the server. You will also find Xdebug to aid in your debugging process.

By Jack Wallen

Jack Wallen is an award-winning writer for TechRepublic, The New Stack, and Linux New Media. He's covered a variety of topics for over twenty years and is an avid promoter of open source. For more news about Jack Wallen, visit his website jackwallen.

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