[Plug alert] For longer term monitoring, Project BISmark provides an easy-to-use system. It's an open source, customizable OpenWRT-based home router that runs periodic network measurements (latency, throughput, packetloss, jitter, etc) to nearby MLab servers. It uses netperf (single and multiple TCP threads), and shaperprobe, (UDP) for throughput measurements. Although its original target audience is home users, it can also be used as a monitoring tool in bigger networks. More information here: http://projectbismark.net/ Slides from the talk at NANOG 53: https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog53/presentations/Monday/Sundaresan.pdf - Srikanth On 04/04/2013 06:45 AM, Steve Haavik wrote:
It'd be nice to know if NDT was not accurate as well. Anyone tested it?
We've been using it for a few years. On my laptop that runs linux I get fairly consistent results (around 935Mb/s up and down right now) over a 1Gig routed link (a couple routers and a firewall in between.) On the Windows boxes I usually see a 100 to 200 Mb/s drop on the upload side. The last time I checked, you can compile a commandline version of the client. I seem to remember the commandline client not taking quite as bad a hit on the tests compared to running it on linux, but it's been a while since I tried it.
For us it's been way more accurate than the various speedtest servers our customers insist on trying. A while back I switched from compiling my own kernel and NDT to using perfSONAR-PS (http://psps.perfsonar.net/). I like that they've got live-cd and net-install versions. If nothing else it's useful for pointing out the difference between a local network issue and Internet Suckage.