One of the first things I do upon installing a Linux distribution is put the Network Monitor applet on my GNOME panel. Watching the blue lights twinkle on and off makes me aware of network traffic.

A group called the Traffic Squeezer project released an open source application that accelerates WAN network traffic. The Traffic Squeezer software uses lossless compression and other procedures to accelerate traffic on Linux-based network devices, and it's said a port to an embedded hardware version is planned.

ntop is a free opensource network traffic probe that shows the network usage. ntop is based on libpcap and can run on Linux/Unix and Windows operating system. ntop provides a very easy to use a web access to navigate through ntop traffic information and get a dump of the network status.

This how-to will teach you two commands, iftop and nethogs, that you can use to monitor network traffic on a Linux machine. You can use iftop to view traffic by individual connection, port, network segment, or remote host, which gives you a detailed accounting of all packets coming in and out of your machine.

Speedometer shows a graph of your current and past network speed in your console, letting you see your network connection's up and downstream speed and history at a glance. You can also use speedometer directly on a file to monitor the download performance and history of a specific download instead of all network traffic.

IPTraf is a console-based network statistics utility for Linux. It gathers a variety of figures such as TCP connection packet and byte counts, interface statistics and activity indicators, TCP/UDP traffic breakdowns, and LAN station packet and byte counts. IPTraf is an IP traffic monitor that shows information on the IP traffic passing over your network.

f you are a Network Administrator with little knowledge in Network Protocols and IPtables, don't worry you can also control your network traffic with a simple tool named wondershaper. It Works on Linux 2.4 & higher.

Linux is an excellent platform for network administration. If you want to monitor your network traffic, you can find many tools -- some accessible from a Web interface, others using a graphical interface -- but nothing beats the speed of the command line.

mz (Mausezahn) is a versatile packet creation and network traffic generation tool. Using this tool You can Jam a Network.

This utility is used for Stress Testing of Networks and Firewall Testing. also for Finding weaknesses in network software or appliances.