[Scottish] Network testing tools?

[Mark Robinson]

Hello Paul,

Thursday, 04 December 2003, you wrote:

PM> On Thu, 4 Dec 2003, Mark Robinson wrote:
>> I'm having trouble proving to Demon that there are problems with an
>> ADSL connection. It's _really_ slow at times, comes to a halt, then
>> everything seems to load.  We've had pings with 19% packet loss to one
>> of Demon's own name servers!

PM> Sounds like a dodgy ADSL link: 19% packet loss is enough to seriously 
PM> upset TCP.

It got worse and worse.  56% loss for 1500 packets...

PM> Try MTR
PM>   http://www.bitwizard.nl/mtr/

PM> Really, its nothing more that an automated traceroute + ping, but its
PM> still useful.

Very useful, and the guy I got on Demon's support line not only knew
about it, but was actually going to get me to install it!

We have been moving people away from Demon for a while, but I have to
say that this time they were very good. The guy was very helpful, and
while the fault process is extremely long and drawn out it all went
through fine. It turned out to be the ethernet side of the router (the
last mtr I ran with 500 packets only returned 13 packets!), and they
got BT out to replace it before lunch the following day...

Mark.