In this book, we describe various software applications and suites that give us the ability to monitor our networks. Increasingly, open source software is appearing in today's enterprises in place of or in addition to commercial network management software. When we refer to open source software, we mean that it's free to download and use. While this sounds like shareware or even freeware, it's not. Take some time to review the General Public License (GPL), available at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html as well as the Open Source Initiative's site at http://www.opensource.org. Furthermore, licenses have many variations; sometimes a project creates its own specific license that you must review (for example, Big Brother 's "Better Than Free" license). All of the software we describe in this appendix is available from SourceForge (http://www.sourceforge.net). Additional open source SNMP tools can be found on sites like http://freshmeat.net. Table G-1 lists the applications we discuss in this appendix.
|