nanog mailing list archives
Re: Network chatter generator
From: Jason Healy via NANOG <nanog () nanog org>
Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2024 18:42:42 +0000
On 2024-02-23 17:33, Brandon Martin wrote:
Before I go to the trouble of making one myself, does anybody happen to know of a pre-canned program to generate realistic and scalable amounts of broadcast/broad-multicast network background "chatter" seen on typical consumer and business networks?
You may want to check out TRex: https://trex-tgn.cisco.com It's free and uses the DPDK framework, so even a 5-year-old Xeon box should be able to saturate 10g (14Mpps) which is usually enough to make most small things fall over. IIRC, it uses PCAP files as a template for traffic generation, and replaces the header info (src/dst) with values you configure. So, if you have some captures with the background chatter you want, you can probably turn around and use those for testing. The tool includes some console programs that show throughput, drops, etc. You can scale the generation to any level you want (it just loops over the captures). You can also turn on multiple generators (each with its own capture) to simulate a mix of traffic at different sizes and rates. The distribution comes with several canned captures (imix, dns, large packets, small packets, etc). The one thing I haven't tried with it is multicast, so that might need some extra work. Maybe you can specify a multicast MAC at L2 for the generated packets (normally you set this to the MAC of the DUT)? Jason
Current thread:
- Network chatter generator Brandon Martin (Feb 23)
- Re: Network chatter generator Raymond Burkholder (Feb 23)
- Re: Network chatter generator Saku Ytti (Feb 23)
- Re: Network chatter generator Jesse DuPont (Feb 24)
- Re: Network chatter generator Mel Beckman (Feb 24)
- Re: Network chatter generator Mike Hammett (Feb 24)
- Re: Network chatter generator Brandon Martin (Feb 25)
- Re: Network chatter generator Forrest Christian (List Account) (Feb 25)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Network chatter generator G (Feb 25)
- Re: Network chatter generator Jason Healy via NANOG (Feb 26)