Astonishing. years of unix administration and never stumbled across this goodie?

SS: The Saviour

The ss command is used to dump socket statistics. It allows showing information similar to netstat command. It can display more TCP and state information than other tools. It is a new, incredibly useful and faster (as compare to netstat) tool for tracking TCP connections and sockets. SS can provide information about:

• All TCP sockets.
• All UDP sockets.
• All established ssh / ftp / http / https connections.
• All local processes connected to X server.
• All the tcp sockets in state FIN-WAIT-1 and much more.

Most Linux distributions are shipped with ss and many monitoring tools. Being familiar with this tool helps enhance your understand of what's going on in the system sockets and helps you find the possible causes of a performance problem.

Task: Display All TCP Sockets

# ss -t -a

Task: Display All UDP Sockets

# ss -u -a

Task: Display All Established SMTP Connections

# ss -o state established '( dport = :smtp or sport = :smtp )'

Task: Display All Established HTTP Connections

# ss -o state established '( dport = :http or sport = :http )'

Task: Find All Local Processes Connected To X Server

# ss -x src /tmp/.X11-unix/*

Task: List All The Tcp Sockets in State FIN-WAIT-1

List all the TCP sockets in state -FIN-WAIT-1 for our httpd to network 202.54.1/24 and look at their timers:
# ss -o state fin-wait-1 '( sport = :http or sport = :https )' dst 202.54.1/24

The source code can be obtained from:
http://devresources.linux-foundation.org/dev/iproute2/download/ and more this is included in CentOS5.2.