Simulate High Network Broadcast traffic?

[Pawel Kowalski]

An engineer I work with needs to test one of his ethernet designs on a high traffic network. Since we only have a few workstations on our LAN is there anyway for me to populate the network with simulated broadcast packets? I do know I can easily send a bunch of arp packets using cain and able but I would prefer something a little more realistic.

[Ron]

I went looking for a link to mercury software, and was redirected to this HP site:
https://h10078.www1.hp.com/cda/hpms/...p=1_4011_100__

They have links for trial software...

Check out loadrunner
https://h10078.www1.hp.com/cda/hpms/...5E8_4000_100__

[Pawel Kowalski]

Check out loadrunner
https://h10078.www1.hp.com/cda/hpms/...5E8_4000_100__

Awesome, downloading now. Thanks Ron.

[Pawel Kowalski]

I just installed it and it seems to me like it is meant to simulate traffic to a web server, I can not find any protocols to simulate broadcast traffic.

[Ron]

What if the webserver was serving up huge files? Or am I missing something?

[Pawel Kowalski]

What if the webserver was serving up huge files? Or am I missing something?

Well this isn't really a web server. The only web server on there is for configuring the device so that will not be getting used often. We want to make sure that if this unit is plugged in to a network with high broadcast traffic it will still perform like its supposed to. We did figure out how to send a bunch of nbstat packets using labview but it would still be nice to simulate a real enviroment.

[RickWeb]

I would also benifit from some simulating broadcast traffic software, i went to google it and this thread came up top of the list, "simulate broadcast traffic" is what i googled.

[Pawel Kowalski]

I would also benifit from some simulating broadcast traffic software, i went to google it and this thread came up top of the list, "simulate broadcast traffic" is what i googled.

Let me know if you find anything, I looked all over the place and couldn't find anything. One thing we did play around with was to take a command, I think it was nbstat which requests computer names on the network using a broadcast, and put it in a loop using labview. We could send this out over 100 times a second. We were also able to send some blank UDP broadcast packets the same way but I still don't think this did us any good, we need to simulate real world conditions.

[Ron]

Just curious -- for your purposes how does broadcast traffic differ from other traffic?

[Pawel Kowalski]

Just curious -- for your purposes how does broadcast traffic differ from other traffic?

In a switched network regular traffic is only sent to the computer that is requesting that traffic while broadcast traffic is sent throughout the entire lan. In a large lan this can create a huge bottleneck.

[RickWeb]

In a switched network regular traffic is only sent to the computer that is requesting that traffic while broadcast traffic is sent throughout the entire lan. In a large lan this can create a huge bottleneck.

Yep specialy when you have loop becuase some idiot from "company X" doesn't know what hes doing and every is routing thouhg a 100mb switch when there are 10Gb fibre connections. grrrr

[JPC-NickO]

Hi,

This is a little late and doesn't run on Windows (almost none of the really interesting tools do) but it might help you:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5929

Nothing like a good broadcast storm to grind everything to a halt, eh?

[Pawel Kowalski]

Sorry I didn't see this thread earlier Nick. I book marked that link and I'll see if I can get linux installed on one of the LAN computers. Unfortunately for me I'm not good with linux.

[jason]

Unfortunately for me I'm not good with linux.

Grab a Ubuntu desktop edition image, burn it to a disc, and boot up from that. You'll be up and running with a full graphical environment in about 5 minutes. You can even run it off the CD without installing, but you'll be limited in what you can do with it if you do.

The downside to the default Ubuntu image is that it doesn't have a lot of the common libraries needed to build things from source, so you may have a bit of trouble with the install. You can usually find whatever you need in packages, though. Just use the Synaptic Package Manager (System Menu > Administration) or apt-get on the command line to find and install them.

If you don't want to sacrifice a computer to Linux, Ubuntu runs great in VirtualBox, too. Since the simulator is probably going to be processor and memory hungry, though, you'll want to run it on a system where you can give lots of RAM and processor cycles to the VM (i.e. don't run anything else in Windows and set the VM's available RAM as high as possible before you start it).

--Jason

[Pawel Kowalski]

Thanks Jason, I have some old workstations that are considered spares that I can load this on. I'll give it a try.