[Omaha.pm] Active bandwidth monitoring

[Jay Hannah]

On Jul 16, 2007, at 10:58 PM, Daniel Linder wrote:
> I'm trying to pro-actively monitor the "real world" speed that I'm  
> getting
> with my @Work connection.
...
> Questions:
> 1: Has anyone run across a tool like this that is free and will run  
> on Linux?

I haven't heard of such a thing. I would think that monitoring your  
bandwidth by frequently flooding your network with downloads
wouldn't be a terribly popular tool.  :)

That said, you can stick any numbers you want into RRDTool and it  
will keep your historical trends and generate all your graphs for  
you. I have written some Perl wrappers to throw miscellaneous  
statistics into RRDTool every 5 minutes (via cron), and it does all  
the hard work for me.

> 2: If I stared to write something like this, has anyone got some  
> Perl code
> to grab random URLs from a search engine?

Umm... I guess you could use WWW::Mechanize to feed a random word  
from your local dictionary to Google and hit the "I'm feeling lucky"  
button. But that's not really trending *your* bandwidth because the  
random server on the other end could have bandwidth problems of its  
own and you'd have no way of seeing the difference between your  
bandwidth and theirs.

It seems to me to trend your bandwidth you'd have to hit a known big  
pipe every time, and just assume that your chosen victim always has  
"unlimited" bandwidth and never has server or congestion trouble of  
any kind.

Intentionally and systematically wasting bandwidth seems a strange  
first step towards getting more bandwidth, which is, I assume, your  
ultimate goal.  :)

j