[Q] What is your favorite Network Tools Live CD / USB, which you could have running in remote offices?

Fri Aug 23 04:30:20 UTC 2013

On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 9:17 PM, Christopher X. Candreva
<chris at westnet.com>wrote:

> On Thu, 22 Aug 2013, Stefan wrote:
>
> > a completely different purpose: I would like to put it in the hands of
> all
> > remote offices we have on our network, and use it to have local systems
> > boot out of it, and help us then run troubleshooting tools, from the
> > central office, by SSH/X-ing into the remote live system (e.g. iperf,
> > hping3, httping, tcping, mtr, tcpdump, voip tools, some "thin"
> > clients/apps, synthetic transactions scripted to run at diff time
> > intervals, and report back to us the "health" seen form the remotes,
> etc.).
>
> I'm toying with a similar idea, though of putting a Raspberry Pi in remote
> offices to do tests from. I'm just looking for something I can ssh too,
> however, it also doesn't seem like much of a stretch to put some kind of
> web-based screen that someone in the office could run an automated scan,
> and
> read us off information that might help.
>
>
> ==========================================================
> Chris Candreva  -- chris at westnet.com -- (914) 948-3162
> WestNet Internet Services of Westchester
> http://www.westnet.com/
>
>
There is a lot to be said for the RaspberryPi, but network throughput, and
especially processing power are limited. My tests show that the RaspberryPi
could push only about 46 Mbps of iperf while most PCs configured the same
way get almost to wire speed (100 Mbps or 1Gbps), and processing 30 seconds
of 45 Mbps traffic on the RaspberryPi takes many minutes. But, if you want
to test slower circuits, it can't be beat for cost, size, flexibility.

I am expecting delivery of a Parallella board in October and will be
testing it for iperf capability at GigE speed.

Jon