The Sys admin’s daily grind: Nttcp
UNDER THE WEATHER
Some weather forecasts give you the temperature and a windchill adjustment, and a similar forecast for bandwidth would be helpful. If you feel the bandwidth is too low – and it always is – you need some kind of measuring instrument to reveal the truth.
If you are a DSL customer and want to find out whether you really are getting what you pay for, it makes sense to measure the actual bandwidth between two machines. If I set up an encrypted VPN tunnel, I’m obviously interested in the effect that encryption has on the transmission speed. Is the new antivirus proxy spoiling my customers’ surfing experience? Does the firewall appliance really provide the “wirespeed” the vendor promised? How fast is my wireless LAN with a massive concrete wall separating two access points? Is the PowerLAN connection between my laptop and my Linux video recorder fast enough for streaming? Nttcp answers all of these questions.
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