Gentoo for Network Admins

Purpose
The main purpose of this wiki page is to guide fellow UNIX Network Admins/SRE/DevOps into configuring a fully-fledged swiss-army knife Gentoo for making the Network debugging much more easier.

DNS debugging
contains most of the DNS debugging tools you'll need, such as, and.

SSL/TLS/PKI troubleshooting
,, and others

Port knocking/scanning
Most popular command for is

Check which ports are open, which services are running with.

Traffic analysers
Listen on an interface and show src/dest traffic + speed

Inspect incoming/outgoing packets

Network bandwidth measurement
has many use-cases, for example it can help you understand how much capacity your network has via

IP troubleshooting (L3)
does a traceroute by probing with ICMP packets

In case ICMP is blocked by some firewall in your LAN, you can try

Layer four traceroute, traceroute using TCP

L1 troubleshooting
Link detection, WOL support, Link modes et. al.

Others
Copy logs, file contents et. al. without leaving terminal

External resources

 * Tcpdump Examples: 50 Practical Recipes for Everyday Tasks
 * Julia Evans tcpdump interactive magazine
 * find RFC's easier