On 16/01/14 11:59, Chris Green wrote:
I'm sure I asked this some time ago (i.e. some years ago!) and used the recommended program to check if all my ethernet links were actually running at the spped they were supposedly capable of.
Fairly sure that this is not quite what you were after, but it reminded me of a time when I was with Demon internet, in the infancy of broadband, before speed checking websites. The way of testing download speeds was to use FTP and download a file usually called "FullFile" from their FTP server. You know the size; you time it and a swift bit of maths gives you the transfer speed, and an indication of the speed of your internet connection. You could download one of these files and use something (cp, scp, ftp) to send it to and from your backup system from your main system and get an idea of the transfer speed. *BEWARE* speed will be limited by the slowest component, so if the source FTP server is running slow, your download will be slow and so you may not get a true indication of the speed of your network.
Googling Fullfile gave me this list: http://www.filewatcher.com/m/fullfile.102400-0.html including Demon, but also debian.
Looking at debian gave http://www.filewatcher.com/b/ftp/ftp.debian.nl/pub/Demon/test-0.html
There are several FullFiles here of different sizes. Also EmptyFiles and RegularFiles. Why? Back in the day, V92 56K modems started using compression to increase download speeds. An EmptyFile contains only spaces, or something else highly compressible, and so would download quickly. A FullFile contains info that is deliberately hard to compress, and so gave a "worst case" (slowest) download speed. A RegularFile was designed to be a typical file (if one of those actually exists!)
Once you're transferring a file, the program iftop may help. e.g. sudo iftop -i eth0
will show transfers to/from ip addresses happening over that Ethernet interface. Replace eth0 with the name of the interface you want to check. Sudo for a debian/ubuntu style O/S. su for Fedora based.
HTH
Steve