N-View 3.1 review

N-View is a network monitor for small and medium-sized networks

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 5716K Developer: Wolfgang Ullrich

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N-View is a network monitor for small and medium-sized networks. It features automatic scanning of subnets for host addresses, monitoring of ICMP responses from all hosts, signalling of timeouts and delays in the GUI and by mail, a portscanner, an SNMP client (MIB browser and trap receiver), a graphical display of network traffic for network interfaces, connectivity to hosts by telnet, HTTP browser, or an arbitrary external program (such as ssh), printing of network diagrams, automatic generation of HTML pages, and more.

Here are some key features of "N View":
Simple configuration:

automatic scan for hosts, based on ICMP ("ping"),
configurable limits for response delay, timeout and port scan interval,
individual configuration can be stored in a configuration file;

Graphic display:

automatic arranging of icons for hosts and subnets (optional),
arbitrary background pictures for each screen,
signalling delay and timeout of hosts and subnets with coloured icons,
graphic display of traffic load for selected network interfaces,
arbitrary labelling for all icons and windows;

Signalling of status changes on display, acoustic and per e-mail (optional):

on timeout or delayed reply of a host,
on changes of the open port status,
on receiving of SNMP traps;

Management interface, connections to hosts:

via external browser,
via internal telnet client,
via internal SNMP client/browser;

Flexible display:

showing Subnets as tabbed or cascaded windows,
coloured printer output of network diagrams,
network diagrams can be accessed from HTML browsers from inside the network (external HTML server required);

Requirements:
Java Runtime (JRE) Version 1.5 or above, available as free download here:
TCP/IP protocol stack,
Internet browser (only required for displaying the Tutorial out of N-View);

What's New in This Release:
Code cleanup for all features of previous beta releases.

New Features:

"Dynamic IP" Property to be used for DHCP and DynDNS enabled hosts;
SNMP browser with SNMPv1, v2c and v3 with user authentication and privacy;
SNMP MIB parser for importing MIB definition files (now with enhanced performance);
Java Native Interface Libraries for ICMP for Windows, Linux x86 and Solaris on x86 and Sparc;
Debug level in "Advanced Settings" with Apache logger;
"Snap To Grid" function for icon-positions;
Moveable display tabs for changing the order of subnet-displays;
Improved dialogs for host- and subnet-properties;
Executing external commands on warnings, timouts and SNMP-trap reception;
Enabling sounds on a per host basis;