Re: Network chatter generator

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1

Here's some tools that I've used to stress test gear over the years. You may or may not find some of them useful for your use case:

(1) T50 - be *really* careful with this one:
     - Source: Frederico Lamberti Pissarra / t50 · GitLab
(2) Yersina (can be used for DHCP stress testing)
     - Source: GitHub - tomac/yersinia: A framework for layer 2 attacks
     - Useful info for DHCP-specific stress testing: DHCP DOS Attack with Yersinia in Kali Linux / BackTrack | How To | AmIRootYet
(3) wrk - L7 endpoint load testing - I typically use an Ansible playbook to generate artificial load from multiple source systems, which also allows you to consolidate the stdout reporting from each system
     - Source: GitHub - wg/wrk: Modern HTTP benchmarking tool

2

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