how to measure network debit between to boxes ?
 

I am trying to connect my powerbook to my linux box on which I've configured an nfs export of my home directory through a wireless router to which both machines are connected

The problem is that it seems really slow but I'd like to be able to measure it. Can someone advise on a simple utility that tests connection between 2 machines ?

Thanks a lot

You could ping from one to the other, the results will include the time required. This however, will only give you best case times and will not account for nfs overhead.

You could try copying a largish file from one to the other and time that. Are you in an electronically noisy environment? You could be seeing a lot of retransmissions due to that. Are you at home? Is there a microwave in use when you are doing this?

Thanks Peter,

There is not much electronic noise that I would suspect in my house and the microwave oven is not often in use.

The problem to copy the file is that I need to establish a connection to my sftp server on the linux box and try to put or get files there. But the sftp connection never gets established.

I thought there was maybe a firewall problem but I disabled it and it still seems pretty slow.

I can ssh to the linux box, I can print through cups but the nfs mount is really sluggish (it works by the way) and seems to lock things up before I can attempt to transfer a file. I'll try again.

I'm looking for something that shows analyses the traffic and helps diagnosing what the problem is....

Try here:

http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/performance.html

If that doesn't help, let me know.

Thanks a lot Peter. That should help. When I am sorted I'll post it here.

Ok, it's sorted. The desktop is connected to the router using a network cable and, yes, it was not correctly connected. Basically communication towards the PC was bad. I didn't notice because the downloading of packages and web pages was not affected.

Now nfs exports work normally (able to play an mpeg file on the notebook from the desktop export) and so does the remote X applications.

Now I just have to find how to get the powerbook X server to connect to the desktop xdmcp server.

Thanks