"A few years back, I used an old 486 running Red Hat Linux and tcpdump to easily diagnose a client's denial-of-service attack, illustrating the benefits of creating a powerful network analysis tool from 'scrap' parts. There are plenty of tools to build a similar Windows-based network analyzer, but Linux can run on machines that can't efficiently run Windows.
"I will now show you how to test the system and install libcap, a package that grabs network packet data; tcpdump, a basic but crucial sniffer package that displays that data sequentially; and iptraf, which presents trends and summaries of the data..."
