Kevin Devin’s recent Tech Chat for his In The Trenches (ITT) podcast focused on small information technology (IT) shops.  It was interesting in that of late, most of all my work has been about "large" enterprise efforts, but I was thinking that the folks who have "plenty" can help out the little guys via podcasts and weblogs in a serious force mulitplier way.

For instance, Sandra Gittlen over at Network World has a list of "open source testing tools" used in the Network World Lab Alliance:

• AirJack and File2Air for doing wireless penetration testing
• Ethereal for doing network protocol analysis
• Fedora Core as a general-purpose operating system
• Firefox with LiveHTTPHeaders & Web Developer Extension for testing and troubleshooting web pages
• Iperf allows for TCP/UDP packet analysis (capacity, latency, loss)
• Kismet finds and analyzes security settings on wireless access points
• Multi Router Traffic Grapher is a network based time series traffic grapher
• Netperf offers network traffic generation and benchmarking
• Nmap allows you to map out all network devices, services, and operating systems on a network [Tech Tidbits Daily for 15Feb05]
• Nessus is a vulnerability scanner that checks for known vulnerabilties
• Snort is an all-purpose intrusion detection system (IDS) that can be utiliized for packet sniffing and logging