GEO Spider

For non-technical users, GEO Spider is at best a mildly nifty toy which will show you where a particular site is located. For techie types and network administrators, however, it is quite useful. You can enter a number of hosts, and see their geographic locations, as well as detailed WhoIs and TraceRoute information. (If you don't know what those things are, this program will probably not be of much use to you.)

The uses are many. It can help track down why some connections are unusually slow, reveal the rough location of an attacker on your network (with luck, it's the 13-year-old next door and you can just go have a stern word with him), and easily check to see if systems are up by 'pinging' them. The WhoIs function will help identify network owners and contact personnel. All of these tools are readily available in other forms, but having them tightly integrated into a graphical interface is very nice.

At $30 following the 30-day trial period, GEO Spider is worth it for those who regularly perform network analysis.

--Ian Harac