Is there a LAN speedtest? (need answer about:fast!)

Factual Questions
1

I just replaced a few pieces of network equipment here to boost up to a Gigabit connection. Other than relying on what it says in the marketing materials, is there a way to get a readout of the actual connection speed? Something like one of the speedtests you can find on the net to check your Internet connection, but for the intranet connection.

When I open Network Connections in WinXP and look at the properties of the Local Area Connection, it says the speed is 1.0 Gbps. But that seems so … so round.

Is there a way to check this on a Linux machine (Ubuntu)?

What about on a Mac OSX machine?

What about between machines – that is, from one box, through the router, to another machine?

Thanks,

Rhythm

2

I’m not aware of any programs that’ll do that for you, but you could always just copy a large file over the network, and see how long it takes.

3

Can’t you just ping the IP of the other computer? That would send a packet of fixed length back and forth, and tell you how long it took to do that. It’s possible that the network is too fast to gather any useful information that way, my own 100Mbit LAN typically gives times of <1ms when I ping my router with 32 byte packets…

4

I haven’t tried them, but this page recommends a few solutions.