My toolbox – an incomplete list:
MTR – Link Diagnostics
IPerf – bandwidth test
TCPTrack – track tcp connections per interface
MTR:
An indespensbile trouble shooting tool is MTR. It is already a part of my favorite distro, Ubuntu. It combines the functions of ping and traceroute, and the info provided is excellent for diagnostics. More at: http://www.bitwizard.nl/mtr/
Just use it in place of ‘ping’. For example:
mtr 10.10.10.1
This will update your terminal display with:
– Packet Loss %
– Packets Sent
– Ping, Last Response Time
– Ping, Average Response Time
– Ping, Best Response Time
– Ping, Worst Response Tim
and my favorite
– Ping, Standard Deviation
IPerf:
The gold standard for bandwidth testing. In Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install iperf
To use, you need one session running as the server, and another (or several) as the client.
A quick example:
Server:
iperf -s -D
this command will run the server
Client:
iperf -c 10.10.100.1 -r -t 30 -P 3
this will connect to a server at IP 10.10.100.1, and perform a two-way test for 30 seconds each. The -P 3 is interesting, as it will run 3 parallel processes to get full bandwidth results. This is especially useful on a Windows system, and a single connection test won’t be able to pump out the full bandwidth capabilities.
The results are quite useful.
TCPTrack:
Quick reference to active connects on an interface. Excellent on a proxy/ router to monitor who might be using to much traffic
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