Networking

You sometimes want to check if a program that you've installed is doing anything funky. While you could install a full-blown packet analyser like WIreshark, sometimes, that is overkill. A quicker and handier option would be to just rely on good old netstat. Like so:

netstat -bn 10

as well as

netstat -bf 10

-b: displays the program name (executable)

-n: displays the IP address

-f: displays the resolved form of the IP address

10: indicates that the command should be repeated after 10 seconds

One of my laptops which is running on Kubuntu Lucid decided to stop connecting to my network today. I found that the KDE network-manager applet (or is it a plasmoid? :S) had decided to disable itself. Clicking it stated so with no option to re-enable it (nice UI, boys). Getting to the commandline and starting the network-manager service did not help. I also found that accessing the System settings networking configuration gave me corrupt XML file errors.

Recently, when I was just about to shut down my Windows box, I noticed that my ethernet system tray icon was all lit up even though I had closed all applications. These kinds of things usually point at some kind of trojan in your system. So, I took some time to investigate it.