Network testing software

Dist

Dist

Dist

Soldato
Joined
1 Jun 2005
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5,152
Location
Kent
I'm currently in the early stages of planning a probject for a course I'm on, and one of the things I would like to do is to be able to accurately test my wired and wireless home network in a way that is accurate and would not be bottlenecked by anything other than the network itself (so for a throughput test I dont want to simply transfer a file, because other than being hard to record results it could be slowed down by hard drives or the machines themselves).

So does anyone have any free or open source programs (doesn't have to be all in one, I don't mind using multiple programs if needed) that I can test throughput of my wired and wireless network, and in the case of wireless also monitor signal strength so that I can input the data into another program to create a contour map.

If none know a prorgam that can create a contour map then a program to accurately monitor signal strength wont be needed as I can't think of any other good way to represent that data.

And to give you an idea of what sort of contour map I'm talking about, something like this, but with a floorplan of my house and going from green to red depending on signal strength.

contourmap.png
 
For throughput iperf is probably your best option. Don't have a clue regards to plotting wifi strength though.
 
Dist said:
So no one has any idea of any free/open source programs that can meet any of my needs?
Click to expand...

http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider for wifi signal strength (there are others but this one came to mind).
If your router supports snmp, that would be your best bet for getting data rates (snmp is fairly lightweight and shouldn't affect network performance to much), unless of course it's cisco kit, then it may be worth looking at netflow. Try PRTG (for windows) for capturing the snmp data and producing some graphs, or raw data as csv files.
Other than that I would suggest looking on Freshmeat and search for network monitoring software and network testing software. There is plenty of it out there, most of the free stuff will require some *nix variant to run, and may require compiling from source rather than been pre-packaged.
 
Thanks for the program suggestions.

I think I may have found a way to create a contour map, but it involves create a 3d model in blender using signal strength as a Z coordinate, and then adding colour to it and viewing it from above. It should hopefully work, but it is a lot more work than should be required :(
 
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