[clug] Advice needed: monitoring my ISP's speed

[Daniel Smith]

On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 12:18:13PM +0800 or thereabouts, Simon Cousins wrote:
> 
> Hi Cluggers,
> 
> I'm sitting behind a corporate Ethernet net feed in Beijing that varies from
> 100+Kb/sec to 0Kb/sec all day every day.  I suspect the building owners are
> not buying enough feed to satisfy all the building's tenants.
> 
> I have a Linux host co-located in a local kickass Beijing datacenter, so I
> figure I have the hardware necessary to monitor an end-to-end speed test for
> a week.  
> 
> I'm unsure of the best way to proceed with setting up a test though.  I
> recall a handy Linux app that graphed a wide range of performance
> characteristics on Ethernet and router ports a few years ago, but the name
> escapes me.  I've googled for advice, but amongst the detritus of vendors
> hawking internet 'acceleration' and USA-based host testing, I've been
> unsuccessful in getting CLUG-quality advice.

You could try smokeping, YA fine Toby Oetiker tool.

http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/smokeping/

It will give you latency and packet loss measurements.

We currently use it for VoIP monitoring across AARNet.

> Any suggestions gratefully received.  I need hard evidence to force the
> landlord to take my complaints seriously (building complex Zope portals
> ain't much fun behind 4Kb/sec...)

I'm guessing latency and packet loss are what's hurting you,
as 4K(reliable,lowlatency) is heaps for a shell connection.

Daniel