Re: [TCLUG:4236] ISP dropping packets

[Michael Hicks <hick0088@tc.umn.edu>]

> 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?

There is a tool called pathchar that is used to determine the bandwidth
of certain connections.  It sends out a large number of packets with
random sizes and by seeing how long they take to go and come back, it
can determine whether you're connected to a modem, DS1, DS3, or other
connection (well, sort of..  it's not terribly reliable ;-)

However, since it sends out large numbers of packets (as opposed to the
usual 3 of traceroute..), it can give you a fairly good idea of where
the problem lies..  Unfortunately, each hop takes several minutes to
test..

http://www.caida.org/Tools/Pathchar/
ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/pathchar

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