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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

AutoScan-Network is a network discovering and managing Tool. No Special configuration is required to scan your network.

Main Features:
•Multithreaded Scan
•Automatic network discovery
•Realtime detection of any connected equipment
•Supervision of any equipment /service (router, server, firewall, smtp, http, pop)

DarkStat is a simple Packet Sniffing Network Traffic/Bandwidth monitoring utility for Linux and UNIX. DarkStat presents simple webinterface with nice graphs and stats auto-refreshed. Darkstat uses a very low footprint and the memory, CPU usage and is used in pfSense, redWall opensource firewalls.

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.

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.