NetMate

There are various network-related tools on the market that can help you with understanding how network protocols interact with each other in order to achieve communication between network devices.

NetMate is a simple utility that does not need to be installed on the system as it works just by launching the executable file in the archive.

Its purpose is to display network protocol headers in 32-bit aligned fields, as available in the RFC (Request for Comments) document from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

There are no settings to tinker with but this does not mean that it is for just about anybody because pretty good knowledge about network protocols is required to reveal its true potential.

Since it is a GTK-based application it requires GTK+ to be installed on the system. Also, it relies on WinPcap libraries to load and extract the necessary information from the network dumps.

As far as support for input files goes, NetMate works with PCAP(NG) format, which is easily created by applications like the Wireshark or other similar programs.

Once the network dump is loaded, details relating to the communication are displayed, such as source and destination ports and addresses or packet flags. In the lower part of the panel it displays the network protocol headers.

The list of network protocols supported includes Ethernet, SLL, ARP, ICMP, ICMPv6, IPv4, IPv6, TCP and UDP.

NetMate is not a complicated tool, but it is aimed at a specific category of users that knows a few things about network communications and what the entire process entails.

It is a good utility for checking how protocols work and there are tooltips offering details for the information listed. However, plenty of options that could make learning a lot easier are missing.