by all means, ping all you like. please do realize that
routers have other things to do besides answer pings when
they're busy. just because a router doesn't respond to
15% of its pings doesn't mean that it's dropping 15% of
its packets or that there is a 15% loss on a line. router
load is not router load, process switched packets are not
the same as card-level switched or cache switched.
there aren't any easy answers. perhaps we should all just
implement "ping" servers in pops ( a 386 running
linux or bsd might suffice).
Jeff Young
young@mci.net
So then perhaps since multiple (last I recall) hosts already exist on
MAE-East; we could use them for an experiment of sorts. One could take
two hosts and setup a program akin to a loopback on each, operating on
TCP ports.
A standard data set could then be transmitted back and forth at certain
time intervals and compared. The result could then in theory say that
there was such heavy load on the MAE, that packets were dropped -- even
with retransmission. In any case, it would be more substantiative than
pinging Cisco's.
Correlating this info (it a 5minute increment was chosen, this would be
easier) we could correlate any detected lossage information with the
utilization statistics presently being generated.
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Jonathan Heiliger @~/ . . \~@ MFS Global Network Services, Inc.
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