Network Monitoring Software ~ I'm a newbie

[ASSFAULT_RACIN]

Two things
1. I'm installing Red Hat 9. New to all of this what is a good software for Linux? Red Hat, FreeBSD, any other flavor of it?
2. I want to monitor companies networks and I'm looking for good free software to allow me to do this... Is Red hat good for it or should I be using other flavor of the software to do this?

Thanks for your time.

[bpark]

Red Hat 9 is fine. It's a good place to start learning Linux. As for networking monitoring, tcpdump and ethereal are pretty good.

[Dolda2000]

All distros are more or less the same in the bottom; just some details like program configuration options and some init scripts and stuff actually differ. What is best for you depends on what you want to do, of course; monitoring networks is a pretty broad concept.

Also, FreeBSD isn't Linux - It's another open source UNIX.

[ASSFAULT_RACIN]

The what is the different (major or minor) about Linux and Unix?

I'm looking for Network monitoring software that will see who is the heavy talker, where they are going, what ports they are using, what protocals they are using, and so on.

Thanks all for your help. I'm wanting to learn all of this.

[Dolda2000]

Linux is essentially just another UNIX, with the difference that unlike most UNIXes, it's not based off the original UNIX code that was written back in '69. And, most importantly, it's free. FreeBSD is also somewhat free, but in my mind the GPL is better than the BSD license. Also, Linux is really just the kernel, the rest of the O/S is built mainly of different components of the GNU system.

All UNIXes differ in more or less subtle ways; which one is best depends on your exact software demands and what hardware you're intending to run it on. For this purpose, Linux is probably among the best, since its IP stack is, as far as I know, among the best that there is.

I don't really know what software to use for statistics gathering of network traffic, but to just dump the packets, tcpdump and ethereal are two great programs.