Re: Measuring PoP to PoP latency--tools to use?

[Marshall Eubanks <tme () 21rst-century com>]

Brian wrote:

> I once worked for a company that wrote a unix script that worked like this.
> Basically imagine a quare chart will all the pops listed across the top and
> down the left side. Every few minutes, each pop tries a small ping burst to
> ping all of the others, and the values are filled into the chart.  Results
> are color coded as green, yellow, and red.
>
>     Brian
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Sam Thomas" <sthomas () lart net>
> To: "mike harrison" <meuon () highertech net>
> Cc: "Grant A. Kirkwood" <grant () virtical net>; "Sean Donelan"
> <sean () donelan com>; <nanog () merit edu>
> Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2001 7:27 AM
> Subject: Re: Measuring PoP to PoP latency--tools to use?
>
> > when someone asked me to do something like this, i waded through caida's
> > site and came accross this:
> >
> > http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/
> >
> > it's pretty cool stuff. requires *nix box, perl5, and some sort of
> > webserver software to produce simple reporting. there's also (optionally)
> > utilities that draw some pretty graphs that require gnuplot/ppmtogif.
> >
> > imho, this is considerably better than logging into your router to do
> this.
> > routers are much better at forwarding packets than sending/receiving
> > them. (except older non-distributed routers, which aren't particularly
> > great at either for high traffic volumes) other bonus: no automated
> sending
> > of passwords from a box that might not get much admin attention.
> >
> > one could probably modify these tools to use fping, but i just played
> > around with them for edutainment purposes. there's no mention of copyright
> > that i can find, but one should ask before using for commercial purposes.
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 23, 2001 at 08:32:17AM -0400, mike harrison wrote:
> > > > It was cheesy, and not particularly scientific, but I've been trying
> to
> > > > find something like that to implement for the marketing folk. It could
> > > > probably be adapted into something more useful to us though. Suffice
> it
> > > fping, from Stanford originally, now at www.fping.com
> > > might be useful, it pings multiple hosts at the same time
> > > (fast, efficient) It has easy to parse output and easily gives results
> > > like:
> > >
> > > fping -e <targets
> > > www.chatt.net is alive (0.32 ms)
> > > www.att.net is alive (27.5 ms)
> > > www.uu.net is unreachable
> >
> > --
> > Sam Thomas
> > Geek Mercenary

The NLANR Multicast beacon does this now for multicast :

http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/beacon/
http://beaconserver.accessgrid.org:9999/

It would be pretty trivial to modify this for a set of unicast beacons; the code is available.
There would have to be beacon management or discovery (now done implicitly by multicast).
You might want to lower the beacon send rate as well.


--
                                 Regards
                                 Marshall Eubanks



T.M. Eubanks
Multicast Technologies, Inc
10301 Democracy Lane, Suite 410
Fairfax, Virginia 22030
Phone : 703-293-9624       Fax     : 703-293-9609
e-mail : tme () multicasttech com
http://www.on-the-i.com

Test your network for multicast : http://www.multicasttech.com/mt/
 Check the status of multicast in real time :
 http://www.multicasttech.com/status/index.html