Toolbox
A few of the tools you can use to check your connection and the
performance are collected here.
Throughput
If you want a quick check of your connection speed, my Downstream
Speed Test page is probably your best bet. For a more thorough check,
the AnalogX NetStat Live package is highly recommended. Notice that
downstream speed of DOCSIS cable modems may be severely degraded if the
upstream is being filled up at the same time.
- Downstream
Speed Test mirror in London, UK with bandwidth kindly donated by
the hosting company Win-Hosting
- let them host your website!
Downstream
Speed Test mirror in Australia with bandwidth kindly donated by
the folks at www.nextwish.org
- a hardcore gaming site.
Downstream
Speed Test mirror in the UK with bandwidth kindly donated by www.Broadband-Britain.info
- a new broadband site for the brittish users.
If you have a well-connected web server with PHP capabilities and
would like to donate some bandwidth, please let me
know. I would love to get a few more mirrors of this test. You get
traffic in return for donating bandwidth (10 GB/mo or so).
- The
speed test at the Computing Central auto-loads another (huge)
page and times the operation in order to calculate your actual
connection speed. Notice that this is downstream only, and this is
not a very good way to measure the true speed of your cable modem -
but it's quick.
- Speed
Tests from DSL Reports. Pretty much the same thing, only this
site uses a Java applet to measure both upload and download speed.
They also collect statistics, so you can see how you measure up.
- NetStat
Live at AnalogX is a full blown freeware TCP/IP performance
monitor for Windows. Highly recommended. Do a download from a FTP
server at your cable modem head-end, and let NetStat tell you what
speed you get.
- DOS FTP. The plain old FTP program in your MS-DOS prompt window is
actually also a fine way of testing download speed. Do a FTP
download from a local server at the head-end, and you will get the
transfer speed in kb/sec. Same goes for upstream.
Latency
The netdiag script allows you to get more information about your IP
address, your connection latency and a traceroute from this server (in
Pittsburgh, USA) to your cable modem. This may help troubleshooting some
problems, but please note that this is strictly a do-it-yourself
service. I do not provide any further assistance in troubleshooting your
modem connection, please contact your service provider if you need
assistance.
- Run
the netdiag script here (may take 10-20 seconds to complete).
This will tell your IP address, provide a traceroute to you and ping
you a few times to check your latency. Note: this may
generate warnings in your firewall software about port scans or
network attacks originating from 209.68.2.155 - please do not
complain about this to me or Pair Networks who hosts this web site.
- Ping your head-end. Use the plain old ping program in the MS DOS
command prompt window to ping a server at your local cable modem
head-end. This will give you the latency for the cable modem system.
The script was developed by Lars Kellogg-Stedman, and he maintains a
list of other sites that run this script here
if you want to get a second opinion.
Traceroute.org
maintains a list of sites that will provide traceroutes back to your
host (or, in some cases, to any arbitrary IP address).
Security
The following web sites does a pretty good check of your security.
Note that broadband connections are much more likely to be hacked than
dial-up connections, so make sure you check how open your system is.
Notice that this obviously does not work if the IP address of your PC is
not accessible from the outside (like a 10.x.x.x, 172.16-31.x.x or
192.168.x.x address).
- HackerWhacker is trying
many of the tricks a potential hacker could pull on you. It is a bit
complex, but it really gets through quite a few things.
- Security
Space My Security Desktop Audit may be easier to understand, but
still provides a good and serious checkup of your system security.
If you find you need better protection, you can read
more about firewalls
in the article section and find more links
in the link database.
Dns2Go: Host your own server and circumvent
any port blocks your provider may have by using the (free) DNS2Go
program from Deerfield. Download it from www.dns2go.com!
Got other useful tools? Let me know!
cable-modems.org
