ISP dropping packets

[Tim Wilson <wilson@chemsun.chem.umn.edu>]

Hi everyone,

Our school district has been having problems with our ISP lately. They are
claiming it's mr.net who's claiming it's USWest, and on and on and on. The
problem causes generally slow connections. It's itermittent so they're
having trouble tracking it down. Sometimes it gets so bad that telnet
sessions running to machines outside of TIES (our ISP) are so slow that
it's essentially unusable.

Apparently they're getting a lot of packets being dropped. I was doing
some pinging this morning and found that we were losing something on the
order of 15% of the packets. I'd like to do some more investigating.

Is there a tool I can run on my Linux box that will evaluate that sort of
thing. I thought maybe a shell script that would periodically ping a
predetermined group of IP addresses and save the statistics to a file for
examination later. Is this a reasonable approach? Of course, I'm not sure
how to write such a script, but I bought a copy of O'Reilly's bash book
recently so I could probably figure it out. Does anyone have a better
idea?

-Tim

--
Timothy D. Wilson			"A little song, a little dance,
University of MN, chem. dept.		a little seltzer down your 
wilson@chem.umn.edu			pants."   -Chuckles the Clown
Phone: (612) 625-9828                       as eulogized by Ted Baxter