[SOLVED] Data Link Verification Software?

business_kid · 03-30-2013, 02:43 PM

Has anyone written software for verifying communications links? I'm working on a student optical tranceiver project. I intend to have two, and these will have send & receive capability. No intelligence really - think of it as a piece of wire. The idea is to exercise them with patterns and verify each answer. I do have a Raspberry Pi on debian that might be useful and usb is fast enough. I have a laptop on slackware also, but no serial port, so device id etc, will all fail.

jefro · 03-31-2013, 06:20 PM

I am not sure I understand the issue. I might be tempted to send a file back and forth and check md5 each time.

business_kid · 04-01-2013, 04:10 AM

I was hoping to be able to leave something automatic running through an evening (a reasonable temperature cycle in these parts) and get back figures like
Total transferred 16G
total error bits 0

chrism01 · 04-01-2013, 11:10 PM

Jefro's idea sounds ok to me. For a slightly more paranoid approach, change the file each time and check that new md5sum each time.

business_kid · 04-03-2013, 03:56 AM

md5sum is good between big endian & little endian boxes?

jefro · 04-03-2013, 05:49 PM

I guess you may not easily test md5 in the pi but send it back to the x86 to verify it did return correctly.

You had me wondering on this. I have never tested md5 on a sparc and compared it to x86.

It would be nice to know this and you brought up a very good point.

I also like the idea of changing data and maybe size.

chrism01 · 04-03-2013, 08:35 PM

Unfortunately don't have a Sparc system handy ... give it a try with one file and let us know.

If it is an issue, as per jefro, just send the file(s) on a loop trip and check back at src system.

BTW, some txfr tools check anyway eg rsync, ssh I believe?

business_kid · 04-04-2013, 05:45 AM

As this is full duplex, a hardware solution is to simply echo bit by bit at one end and do all the hard work with the other end. That way though, it is difficult to get a start and finish point, since the 'piece of wire' that I am building has no intelligence.

Anyhow, the key point of this has been answered. So I'll mark this solved. Nobody knows of software tailored for this purpose. I am inclined to ask since I find web searches offer the best publicised software, not necessarily the best software.