[TriLUG] Request for help: residential internet service provider options.

[Matt Flyer via TriLUG]

Good Question,

Most of the quality tests seem to be oriented on one of a handful of
testing sights for upload, download, and ping, which may not give you the
best results; like you seem to be experiencing with netalyzer.

The first one that comes to mind is MTR, which should show you what node
hops are slow and perhaps let you pinpoint the exact problem spot.

Other things that come to mind include using WGET to try to download a
large file and see what the transfer rate is or if it speeds up and slows
down or even stalls.  You could run this at various times to compare.

Have you looked at the diagnostic output for your network interfaces?  For
example, are they showing a large packet drop or large number of errors?

Are there any services you could connect to that would remain active and
inform you if you have a dropped connection?  E.g. log into a shell at
Pilot or another machine and set the SSH to send a packet every 45 seconds
or so to keep the link open.  If the connection dies, you should know it. 
Similarly, I have a server connected to Jungledisk and I get an alert in
the logs when TWC drops out (which they do much more often than I would
like).

Some searching on this subject brought up a tool called iperf
(https://github.com/esnet/iperf) which is supposed to test quality via 
bandwidth, delay jitter, and datagram loss.  The downside is that it
requires a connection on two ends, though I am sure someone, including
myself, would be willing to help you run this test, which might be good in
that it would be fairly local to the area but still cross ISP boundaries.

Last, this fairly lengthy Linux How To has a lot of suggestions for
troubleshooting various network issues, including DNS through standard
command line tools and mentions the diagnostic switches.  Perhaps it will
have some suggestions that will help you collect data:
http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/wiki/index.php/Quick_HOWTO_:_Ch04_:_Simple_Network_Troubleshooting

One of the big things I have discovered with dealing with ISP problems is
that their support group likes to engage in transaction management in
order to make you go away.  You often times need to hit them upside the
head with actual data and evidence PROVING that THEY have a problem on
their end. (It reminds me of when I kept getting inbound RFC 1918 packets
FROM the TWC modem, which should never have been routed to me in the first
place).  They denied, denied, denied until I showed them repeated logs
with MAC addresses and proved to them that I had no devices in that IP
range on my LAN.


> Hi Matt-
>
> Can you suggest any alternatives?
>
> I'm looking for something that can be called from a command line, but also
> lightweight enough to complete successfully under these conditions.
>
> I've tried the CLI version of Netalyzr (
> http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/index.html) but it reports so many
> problems it's hard to pinpoint any corrective action i can take.  Plus it
> always complains it can't measure downstream bandwidth because the packets
> are blocked.