A friend of mine recently launched a website called NetworkUtils.org. It contains 42 free networking tools covering everything from DNS and IP addresses to email, security and website diagnostics. Now, I appreciate that for most normal people this probably sounds about as exciting as spending Sunday afternoon reorganising the cables behind the television. But bear with me, because after playing with it for a while, I realised there is something rather interesting about what he has built.
We have become remarkably good at making technology complicated. We talk endlessly about artificial intelligence, hyperscale data centres, cloud computing, edge infrastructure and enormous quantities of data flying around the world. Yet underneath all this extraordinary sophistication is something rather more prosaic: networks. And when they don’t work, all the clever stuff sitting on top of them becomes largely irrelevant. Your AI application can have several billion parameters and be capable of composing a sonnet in the style of Shakespeare, but if you can’t connect to it, you have a very expensive collection of computers doing absolutely nothing useful for you.
This is where some surprisingly old-fashioned tools remain incredibly useful. Network engineers (I was one myself once; I do miss my UUNET days) have been using things such as ping, traceroute and DNS lookup for decades. They answer wonderfully simple questions. Is something there? Can I reach it? How long does it take? Where is it actually pointing? Somewhere along the way, however, many of these tools have become scattered across different websites, command lines and specialist services. NetworkUtils.org attempts to put them back together in one place.
Naturally, I decided to test it, trying to remember all my skills from back in the 90s. First, I pinged Google, which confirmed that Google was indeed alive and well, something its shareholders will presumably be relieved to hear. More usefully, the test immediately showed the connection latency and whether packets were being lost. I then pointed its SSL/TLS checker at Attanz Research’s own website. A few seconds later I could see that our security certificate was valid, who had issued it, when it expired, and that the site was running TLS 1.3 with modern encryption. This is information that normally lives somewhere beneath the bonnet of the internet, but suddenly there it was on the screen with me fumbling to remember what TLS stands for
There are still things I would change. One of the tools I tried, the Latency Matrix, promises testing from multiple regions but doesn’t yet make the geographic origins sufficiently obvious in the results. And some of the outputs remain resolutely written for engineers. Tell a network specialist that a website is using TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 and they will know what you mean. Tell most business owners and they will probably assume you’ve accidentally sat on the keyboard. A simple message saying, “Your connection is secure, you’re using modern encryption and your certificate expires in 55 days” would make the same information useful to a much wider audience.
And perhaps that is the interesting bit. We spend a great deal of time trying to make technology more sophisticated, when sometimes what people actually need is for technology to make sophisticated things simpler. I see this repeatedly in the work we do at Attanz Research. Whether we’re looking at data centres, telecommunications, AI or digital services, complexity is rarely the objective. The objective is getting a useful answer to a useful question.
NetworkUtils.org is new and will undoubtedly evolve, but I rather like the principle behind it. Forty-two useful tools, available for free, sitting in one place and helping people understand a little more about what is going on underneath the digital services we all take for granted. Because despite all the extraordinary technological advances of the past few years, sometimes the most useful tool is still the one that simply tells you whether the damn thing is working.
