SmokePing

So, recently I installed an open source latency tester/grapher called SmokePing. It’s from the same guy that made MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher). I’ve long wanted to install a copy to test the reliability of my wifi router at home, as I’ve previously had problems with it. I decided while I was at it, I would have it test my systems here at UW, the DN/BS server, and my systems/connection at home. One convenient thing about SmokePing is that you can perform remote tests via an ssh connection. The system is testing each system with 10 pings every 60 seconds. Here are some screenshots of the resulting graphs.

This is a graph of the connection to my wifi router here at UW. You can see it’s pretty solid in terms of time and packet loss.

This is a graph of the connection from my firewall at home, to my connection via wifi to my ISP’s tower on the ridge. You can see that under high load times we get lots of high latency problems, especially after seven! Also note the high packet loss. This tends to cause very slow connections. How unfortunate!

This is the connection from here at UW to the firewall at home, which strongly correlates to the connection from the firewall to the ridge. Thus the latency and packet loss here is also EXTREMELY HIGH.