Networking
Monitoring a Broadband Router
Just been asked this question by an ex-colleague so I thought it would be good to do a write up. How do I monitor my broadband router? There are a number of measurements that you can do to see the health of your router. External Monitoring Firstly, you can measure whether the outside world can “see” your router. This does mean that you have to allow “pings” from the Internet which does slightly reduce your router security and so this feature is often turned off by default.
VirtualBox Host Interface Networking Update
Great news! The latest versions of VirtualBox have sorted out the issues of host networking. So all of the [messing around that you used to have to do][1], especially under Linux, is now over. So ignore the previous post, it is no longer required. [1]: http://linux.knightnet.org.uk/2008/07/bridged-networking-in-opensuse-103-for.html
Speed of network copy
I needed to copy some big video files from my NSLU2 NAS box to my desktop a couple of days ago and noticed that, using Konqueror, the FTP protocol was significantly faster than using SMB. Using ftp://192.168.n.n/DISK 2/video/… gave me around 5.5MB/s Using smb://192.168.n.n/DISK 2/video/… gave me around 3.5MB/s Of course, the NSLU2 is constrained mainly by only having a 10M network interface but this is a very significant difference in speed.
