Testing a wan link ???

Gaz

Anybody know of a utility to test the bandwith on a wan link ?

Our company has a 512 link to our second site (only a few miles away) and its dog slow, i rang Eircon but they say the line is fine ... checky bastard blamed our routers for slowing it down, eh what ???

Gavin

Could just be simple and ftp a file up and down... All ftp clients I've ever come across will report bandwidth.

Gav

quinta

You should use MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher). You will need to enable SNMP on your router. MRTG runs on Unix and Win32, you will need perl or Activeperl aswell depending on which way you're going to go. This may sound like a lot of work but it isn't, once up and running. This will tell you and graph the bandwidth usage on your link over a given time. Usually over 5 minute intervals, you change this to whatever you like. It can do a hell of a lot more than graph bandwidth aswell, cpu cycles, temperature, router failovers, hard drive usage etc. Detailed intructions on how to set it up are on the site:

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

Eircom and Esat use this to monitor bandwidth usage aswell, as do we.

po0k

As od HEAnet
http://mrtg.hea.net/mrtg/

The Cigarette Smoking Man

You should do a continuous ping during an off peak time and see if there are any timeouts on the line. If there are then the routers could be resending a lot of data.

If they're Cisco routers - do a "clear counters" on one of them - then do a large file transfer (ftp) and do a "show int s0" (or whatever interface your line is on) and have a look at interface resets, CRC and input errors and see how high they are.

GD1

This crowd have good bandwith software
http://www.crannog-software.com/netwatch.html

The 2nd site probably have their phones and applications like Citrix as well as internet and mail so mybe the link should be split.