Internet Maniac ver 1.05

Thanks for downloading Internet Maniac ver 1.0.  I hope you find this program useful (I use it all the time!)  It was designed to be lean and mean. It was written in C and does not use any third party control or dll. It calls the win32 and winsock API directly (hence the small size of the executable). If you find any bugs, or have suggestions for improvements, please send me an email.

Help Topics:

Startup Screen

Host Lookup

Ping

Traceroute

Connect

Time

Finger

Whois

POP3

Listener

Scanner

Speed Check

Winsock

Network Adapter Address

How do I....

•  Copy data to clipboard?

Contact:

Sumit Birla

Email : birla@bitsmart.com

Web Page: http://www.csee.usf.edu/~birla/


Startup Screen

The startup screen shows your computer's name, IP address and your assigned hostname. The assigned hostname remains Unknown if your computer does not have an entry in the DNS server. It's nothing to panic about!


IP Address
Every computer on the internet has a unique IP address. An example - www.microsoft.com has the IP address 207.68.156.52.  If you dial up to an ISP, this number is assigned when you connect to your service provider.


DNS Server
A DNS server resolves hostnames to their IP addresses. For example, the hostname www.ml.org resolves to 209.68.9.100.  Your browser (or any other internet software) uses this IP address to make the connection.


Host Lookup

This window is used for resolving hostnames to their IP addresses and vice versa.  You must be connected to the Internet in order for this to work.  The DNS server specified in the network settings is used for performing these operations.

In the newer versions of Internet Maniac (1.04 and above), Host Lookup returns the complete list of IP addresses corresponding to a hostname.  It also shows aliases if there are any for the host.


Ping

Ping is used for checking if a machine on the net is alive. It shows the time it takes to send and receive a few bytes of data. You can set the number of times you want the host pinged.  The average ping time is shown at the end.

Note : You must have ICMP.DLL on your system to use this function.


Finger

Finger is a unix utility that tells when and where a person logged in from.  You cannot finger a windows machine unless they are running a finger daemon.  To finger a person, type his/her email address in the text box and click on finger. To get a list of all the people logged into a unix system, simply type the hostname in the text box and click on Finger.


Traceroute

This utility is used for tracing the path data takes to reach it's destination.  It shows the names and IP addresses of the routers on the route along the their ping times.  Traceroute can be used for finding out  where slowdown occurs (detecting bottlenecks on a network).

Note : You must have ICMP.DLL on your system to use this function.


POP3
POP3 (Mail Check)

This utility allows you to see if you have messages in your email account without having to log in or running your mail program. Enter the information as described below and then click on Check Mail.

Type in your server name. This is usually the stuff after the '@' sign in your email address. For example, if your email address is bob@hello.com, then your server is hello.com and your user name is bob. The password field is starred out for security reasons and is not saved anywhere.

If an error occurs, an explanation shows up in the status bar. If it does not, send me email!!!


Network Adapter Address
Hardware Address

Clicking on this option gives you your Network Interface Card's (NIC) hardware address. No two NICs share the same address (anywhere in the world). It is factory set!


Scanner

The fun part of this program!  This utility allows you to scan the ports of either a single computer or an entire domain.

To scan a single computer, type in the target computer's IP address or hostname. Make sure the 'host' button is checked and type in the port range. Typically, you would set it to 1 to 1024 since these are the ones that are reserved for standard services. However, you may want to narrow the range since scanning each port takes time.

To scan an entire domain, check the domain button.  Then enter the target domain's IP address in the nnn.nnn.nnn.* format (example 24.92.11.*).  This causes the scanner to scan the selected port of all the computers whose IP addresses begin with 24.92.11.  In this mode, you cannot set a range of portsto scan. Instead, you specify a single port (example 80 for web servers).


Time

Retrieves time from the specified server. The server must be running a time daemon on port 37. An example of such a server is tycho.usno.navy.mil. In the next version, you will be able to synchronize your system clock with the server.


Whois

Whois retrieves information on the specified domain name from Internic's database. The domain name must not have www in it. It must be the top level domain identifying the organization. Example : use cnn.com and not www.cnn.com.  Use usf.edu and not www.usf.edu or eng.usf.edu etc.


Listener

Listens for incoming UDP packets or TCP connections on the specified port.  If TCP is selected, the connection is closed as soon as the incoming connection is detected. In other words, the connection is terminated by listener before any data can be sent or received.  This utility will only show you who tried to connect to your computer. It does not show any data they send.


Winsock

An easy way of looking up what version of winsock you are running on your system along with vendor info, maximum number of sockets (connections) and max UDP size that your winsock stack can handle.

Note : The Vendor Info may appear garbled on some systems. (Removed since version 1.04)


Socket Types
Socket types:

There are two basic types of sockets - TCP and UDP.  The TCP protocol requires a virtual connection to be established before data can be sent and received. UDP, on the other hand, is a connectionless protocol. It does not guarantee that the data will be delivered reliably, but is extremely fast and is used for DNS lookups. Establishing a connection for each hostname lookup would be too expensive.


Port
A port is a number that identifies the kind of service being requested.  A connection cannot be established unless the IP address is accompanied by a port number.  Some common port numbers are :

Telnet - 23

FTP - 21

HTTP - 80

POP3 - 110

Ports 1 through 1024 are reserved for standard services.


Connect

This utility allows you to establish a TCP connection with another computer over the Internet. Once you are connected, you can send and receive data as plain text. As a simple test, you can connect to port 110 of your mail server and then send the following data :

USER <your username>

PASS <your password>

QUIT

Now you know how the POP3 works!!!


Copy data to clipboard?
In order to copy data from ping, scanner and traceroute windows, simply double click in the listbox where the results are displayed. To copy from other windows, select the text, right mouse click and select copy.


Speed Check

This utility can be used for checking the quality of the line between two computers. It shows how much data can pass through in one second.  The two computers can be anywhere on the internet.

Example:

Your are on Computer A and your buddy is on Computer B. You want to check what is the maximum throughput of the connection between the two computers.

•  Run Internet Maniac on Computer A, ask your buddy to do the same on his/her computer.

•  Under tools menu, select 'Speed Check'. (while your buddy just sits back and relaxes!)

•  Type in the IP address or hostname of Computer B.

•  Click on 'Start'.  In a couple of seconds you shall see the speed at which data is being transferred between the two computers.

•  A window pops up on Computer B saying there is an incoming connection from you. If your buddy doesn't want you to check the speed, he can close the popup window and it will reset the connection. This feature prevents bad people from sucking up all the bandwidth!

Note: You can also check the speed between your computer and any other server that runs the chargen server on port 19.