Thanks Lee, you are unreal. Uh, the terminal route is like watching some horror movie to me, but I DO have the iStat Pro and I'll check that method to see, I also am glad to know that there is no real difference between the Cat5e and Cat6 for the walls all have the 5, this will be a big help.
I so appreciate your reply. John On Dec 4, 2010, at 10:35 AM, Lee Larson wrote: > On Dec 4, 2010, at 9:10 AM, John Robinson wrote: > >> HOW do you test to see what is coming out the pipe at the computer? Is >> there a program that will tell you the speed coming through the cable? I >> would like to try this with both the 5e and the 6 to see if there is a >> difference. > > There are several ways: > > Run Activity Monitor and click on the network tab. It has a nice graphical > display of input and output. I've not found it to be the most accurate, > perhaps because it does some sort of averaging that I don’t understand. > > iStat Pro is a free Dashboard widget that I like for this kind of stuff. > > If you're not allergic to the command line, the most accurate way to get the > I/O speed is with the sar utility. You could use > "sar -n DEV 1 10" to get a rolling picture with an average listed at the end. > The devices you want in the list are en0 or en1, depending on how your system > is set up. The sar utility can do a lot of other stuff related to counting > bad packets and such, so you might want to read "man sar" to see the other > command options. > > When I switched my home switch over to a GB model, I went around and tested > all the wired ports in the house. Some are Cat 5e and others are Cat 6. The > way I did it was to put a big dummy file on my Linux server and ftp it to my > laptop at each of the ports in the different rooms. Because I knew the file > size, I timed the network speed with a stopwatch. > > You can create a big dummy file from the command line with > dd if=/dev/zero of=dummyfile bs=1m count=100 > The "count" option lists the number of megabytes in the file, and you can > change it to anything you want. As I wrote it, the command creates a file > filled with the byte 0 repeated 100 million times. The "of" option is the > name of the output file and can be changed to anything you want. (Don't put > any spaces, :, or / in the name.) It might take a while to run, depending on > your hard drive speed. > > I found there was no difference between 5e and 6 over the short runs I have. > I did have to replace one wall outlet because there were many dropped packets > through it. > > > > > _______________________________________________ > MacGroup mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.math.louisville.edu/mailman/listinfo/macgroup _______________________________________________ MacGroup mailing list [email protected] http://www.math.louisville.edu/mailman/listinfo/macgroup
