Generating traffic?

Well, when I do get my CCNA lab equipment, I was thinking of generating some form of traffic through these routers as they are setup. There probably isn't any real point of doing it if I'm just using them stand alone and not attached to my physical home LAN setup. But I find that type of stuff fun... my plan is to install multiple NIC's in my secondary machine and then run VMware to multiple OS's. At this point I could stream videos or transfer large files through FTP, terminal services, etc. After this I could use a hub and use a traffic sniffer to see what kind of protocol info is being passed around. I want to see how things work real time.

In my past experience I have seen commercial IP Traffic generators like AXIA machines and the like, but those look way out of my league in terms of my budget.

Has anyone done anything like this before using the routers into your actual home LAN? I would like to see how they work compared to my crappy SOHO Linksys stuff, especially speed performance and the like.

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Comments

ElitePhoenix

Sadly enough, I don't have a big enough home lab to test this out on, although it seems like the type of project I would undertake if I did have one!

I would just use two computers as end nodes and something as little as a connected AIM session between the two could generate traffic. By the way, a free traffic analyzer I use is Ethereal, you should check it out when you get a chance.

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Danman32

Ethereal was changed to WireShark. If you want the latest code, go to www.wireshark.org

mikej412

Jammywanks wrote:

Has anyone done anything like this before using the routers into your actual home LAN? I would like to see how they work compared to my crappy SOHO Linksys stuff, especially speed performance and the like.

My Cisco equipment is set for remote power-up, so I leave it down. I do have the CallManager Servers (and syslog server, and ACS, and CiscoWorks) up all the time that I leave up on one switch.... so I guess my lab management net -- server farm net is part of the home network.

For traffic to flow through the network I usually just use the extended ping on a router with a loopback as a source ip.

I also have an old laptop running wireshark that I can plug in where needed to sniff -- and generate (or consume?) traffic if needed.

I still use 3 crappy SOHO Linksys Cable/DSL routers on the perimeter of my home network so that I can use my home lab to learn, and not have to worry about opening up my home network to the internet.