ping to introduce traffic

[ahidayat]

Hi everyone, i'm doing small research about wireless network. i want to test the quality of the channel in various different congestion level. i want to use "ping" command to introduce traffic to the network channel. would everyone please tell me what parameters i should use in ping, so that it introduces a quite big traffic to the network. thanks

[minidv2dvd]

you know this is a video site, right?

anyway a ping is only 1 packet or 4bytes or 32 bits. how you send multiples is up to you.

[stiltman]

you know this is a video site, right?

anyway a ping is only 1 packet or 4bytes or 32 bits. how you send multiples is up to you.

you can ping -l 65500 (actually 0 - 65500)

that's pinging jumbo packets of 65,500bytes

You can also trace route which is a better indication of congestion along the way to your distination
You can also use tools like ethereal or cacti

[guns1inger]

FYI Ethereal now goes under the name WireShark, which sounds a lot cooler.

[stiltman]

Yeah, but I still use the older version when needed. Wireshark is limited to sniffing to only what come across the computer it's running on. Not good if you want to put your NIC into promiscuous mode to sniff all traffic

[guns1inger]

True

[jimmalenko]

you know this is a video site, right?

anyway a ping is only 1 packet or 4bytes or 32 bits. how you send multiples is up to you.

you can ping -l 65500 (actually 0 - 65500)

that's pinging jumbo packets of 65,500bytes

You can also trace route which is a better indication of congestion along the way to your distination
You can also use tools like ethereal or cacti

ping -t pings the specified host until stopped using Ctrl-C.

Maybe you could do a ping -l 65500 -t <hostname> ?

Or do a ping/? to see other options.


If you want to introduce traffic, copy a couple of 100MB files across. Then you'll see congestion

[Nelson37]

I agree with sending the 100Mb files, this is a test which will yield useful, real-world results. Check your ping results while the file transfers are going on.

The Ping test is really more of a connectivity test than a real traffic analysis. Users do not know or care about Ping results, however transfer time for a large file is something they can get an immediate handle on.

I used to do a simple batch file loop to make a directory, copy test files, delete originals, and then reverse the process. Generates continous traffic with a simple visual record, brings the hard drive into the test also.

[stiltman]

Yes, but ping only shows you the time it takes to get to and from the distination. The traffic congestion may not even be at the destination, thus skewed results for congestion. Trace route will show you congestion along the way to and from the distination, thus a much better example of congestion