On Sun, Dec 04, 2011 at 12:34:57PM +0000, mick wrote:
On Sun, 4 Dec 2011 11:55:14 +0000 Chris Green cl@isbd.net allegedly wrote:
I have a number of quite long (i.e. 30 metres or more) cat5e cables strung about the place and would like to test how 'clean' they are.
It's easy enough to test their basic integrity (i.e. if all 8 wires are correctly connected) and I have done that. However I'd like to see if they are actually good enough to provide maximum performance when running gigabit. Presumably if they aren't working too well one will see errors and retries at the hardware level - is there a tool for monitoring this?
A Time Domain Reflectometer (TDR) is usually used to identify faults, breaks, poor terminations, degradation in connections etc. Used to be used a lot on old co-ax ethernet cable testing.
Sounds a bit excessive! :-)
I was hoping/wondering if there were any software diagnostic tools for digging around in the ethernet interface hardware and seeing if anything was amiss.