Automated Bandwidth Tests

RouterOS The Dude
1

Hi Guys,

I have been lurking on the forums for the last few months trying to soak up some Dude exp.

I do have a question for the experts out there.

Would it be at all possible to script a bandwidth test between to high sites within the dude done once per day to confirm that the links are working correctly and not suffering from noise or interference thus limiting their connection speed?

I was thinking of using Cron every 24hrs to run a b-test but am not sure if you can use the command line or what the syntax would be.

Any ideas on how to approach this?

Thanks in advance.

2

Are you sure it’s a good idea? When test is running, it will kill all other data for the time of the test.

Plus I think it’s not possible to automate it with the Dude, maybe you can automate some other bandwidth testing program on a device connected directly to the wireless router (linux device + iperf)

3

Hi Normis, I understand your point of view but these tests will be done at midnight outside of business hours.

How would you approach this using iperf as I would want to test the routerboard itself without needing to deploy other linux hosts for testing?

4

In that case the test would be useless anyway. Running Btest from routerboard itself will severely affect CPU load, and decrease the test speed by up to 50%. The Btest is run by sending random data to the other end of the link, and this random data has to be generated by the same routerboard you are testing.

The only way to test wireless links is this:

[powerful PC] – [SXT 1] ##### [SXT 2] – [Powerful PC2]

(test runs on PC1 to PC2)

5

There are many other cases where scheduled [RB] #### [RB] bandwidth test would be useful. RB4xxAH can push 80Mbps in btest and I have plenty of locations where I (manually) check if 15Mbps can pass through (especially in PtMP). So IMO the question and methodology is not w/o merit.

6

You can run BW test in scripts

/tool bandwidth-test x.x.x.x duration=10s do={
… do whatever you need with bw test stats here…
}

Or better way is to use traffic generator which has more control over the traffic you are sending
http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Tools/Traffic_Generator

7

Thanks I will look at the Traffic Generator tool and report back my findings.

Do you think I could graph the results from the bw-test or Traffic-gen via SNMP or another way then I can setup alerts if the speed drops below the baseline i have set?

Thanks for your input thus far.

8

hi, telasera!

So everything is fine now? If yes, could you please pm me and tell what exactly you did that helped?
i’d really appreciate it

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