- I am building a new low-budget customer WAN/LAN network and need some ideas for network management tools.
Generally this means that you have someone technical who will work long hard hours to make things work properly.
I would be most comfortable with free distribution of linux, but I am not sure which distro supports most of the tools? Is the paid OS required for all these tools, like RedHat Server or SuSe or Windows platforms?
No Linux distro organization will "support" these tools, i.e. you have to provide your own technical support. However the tools will run on all recent distros of Linux. In some cases you will have to compile the tool yourself or use a tool like "alien" to convert between .deb and .rpm packages. Because you will be working hard to get the network management tools working properly, I suggest that you go to <http://www.opensuse.org/en/> or <http://www.opensuse.org/it/> if you prefer, and get a distro that is easy to install and manage. To look for tools, the best place to start is at <http://www.caida.org/tools/> which should have a listing of every network-related tool that exists. --Michael Dillon