Network Monitoring Tools 1

[kerp0w]

At home I have a DSL network that is shared between all the apartments in the complex. Having done a quick scan there is usually no more than 10-15 PC's sharing the connection.

The connection seems extremely slow. Pages often take several seconds to load and the ping times are terrible. I lose alot of packets and ping respond times are often as high as 900ms on well known sites (apple,yahoo etc.)

The actual speed of the connection is OK. Using general speed tests the download speed varies from 70kbps up to 250k. This points to latency though I have run TCP Optimizer which changed the maxMTU to 1500 and decreased the receive window to a DSL environment rather than a LAN. The cabling runs at 10mb half duplex.

Is it just other PC's on the network downloading alot of stuff or could there be something wrong with a switch or router.

Is there a share/freeware tool that I could use to view the traffic on the network. (I have used the edition of Network Monitor that came with Microsoft SMS but no longer have access to it). If I can prove that there isn't a huge amount of traffic on the network perhaps the management can get a technician in to look at the network.

Thanx

 

[newmangj]

Ethereal is free and does what you want, there are binaries for both Unix and Window$ available.

If you have SNMP access to the network interface of the DSL unit you might also get some useful information from MRTG

Cheers

 

[olddataguy]

You can get a 30 day trial from AppDancer.

http://www.appdancer.com

http://www.networkuptime.com/tools/

also has some free tools

as well as -

http://www.bluechillies.com/browse/W/F/G/Z/

good luck....TO

 

[johnny99]

I was thinking about something that could also be part of your problem.

If just one of these PC's on your network has a bad NIC this could hurt your network very badly especialy if your network is 10 Mbit/s hubs.

Half-duplex can be a problem. Change to a switched 100 Mbit/s full-duplex network and try to make sure that your router is running 100 Mbit/s full-duplex.

We have a network with a big core switch (something like 128 Gbps capacity) and even on this switch just one bad 10 Mbit/s NIC can hurt performance for everyone running 10 Mbit/s half-duplex.

Another part of your problem could also be that these 10-15 PC's is sharing a lot of data. Some network games can easyly fill a 10 Mbit/s LAN connection.

Getting a stabel network in your installation could be difficult because "control of every single component" is the key.

/johnny