Best way to simulate a WAN network

testing networking bandwidth wan
Richard Nienaber picture Richard Nienaber · Oct 8, 2008 · Viewed 9.3k times · Source

Simplified, I have an application where data is intended to flow over the internet between two servers. Ideally, I'd like to test at what point the software ceases to function. At what lowerbound limit (bandwidth, latency, dropped packets) do things stop working to test the reliability of the software.

What I thought I would do was the following:

  1. Setup up 3 machines (VMware instances)
  2. Install the 2 applications on two of the servers.
  3. Setup up the 3rd server to sit between the two machines by doing some sort of magic with Routing and Remote Access on Windows 2003
  4. Install either Traffic Shaper XP or NetLimiter to limit the bandwidth
  5. Run something like TMnetSim Network Simulator to simulate a bad connection.

Does this sound like a good idea or are there easier/better ways of doing this? I'm not that comfortable on Linux and my team mates are even less so.

Answer

Johan Lübcke picture Johan Lübcke · May 6, 2009

WANem does exactly this. We have used it both in a virtual machine on the desktop and on a dedicated old pc and it worked great. It can simulate all sorts of broken connectivity.

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