Your computer is constantly talking to the Internet. netstat shows you exactly who it's talking to, which doors are open, and what's listening for visitors.
When something breaks on your network, the first question is always 'who is talking to whom?' The ss command answers instantly—faster and more powerfully than netstat ever could.
On Unix, everything is a file—including network connections, devices, and pipes. lsof lets you see what your system is actually doing with all of them.
When something breaks on a remote server, tcpdump lets you watch the actual network conversations—who spoke, who answered, what went wrong.
Wireshark reveals the hidden conversations on your network—every packet, every protocol, every failed connection laid bare for analysis.
Packet captures record every conversation on your network. Learning to read them means learning to hear when something's wrong—a connection that never completed, a server that stopped responding, a client that gave up waiting.
See exactly which connections are consuming your bandwidth right now—iftop shows network traffic as a live conversation between hosts.
When your network slows to a crawl, most tools show you connections and hosts. nethogs shows you the actual culprit: which process on your machine is eating all the bandwidth.
iperf doesn't observe your network—it becomes your network traffic, generating controlled floods between two hosts to measure exactly how much bandwidth, latency, and packet loss a path can handle.
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