Network exercising

[Jacob Dixon]

Hello,

I'm looking to integrate BurnInTest V4.1 Linux into my toolbox of exercisers I use for Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) testing. The only hang-up I've run into so far has been generating enough network traffic to meet standards requirements. Attached is the standard in particular I'm looking to meet -- specifically: > 10% utilization for >250 ms. For a 1000Base-T connection, I'd estimate 10% utilization at ~ 12 MB/s. In addition, the data needs to be checked/validated no errors have occurred at the application level (which it seems Network Test does).

I have two ideas on how to achieve this with BurnInTest, and I'd like your thoughts:

Network Test method

The BurnInTest's ICMP Echo traffic reaches 1 MB/s per connection nominally. I can reach 12 MB/s with:

ping <ip_address> -s 65467 -i .005

So my question: can we adjust payload size and interval to achieve the throughput needed?

Disk Test method

I attempted to get around the network test limitations by setting up a Samba drive share as a disk to 'exercise' like a local /dev/ disk with read/write/compare. However, it looks like BurnInTest's Disk Test only has support for exercising physical drives found in /dev/. Is there a way to exercise mounted drives?

Thank you!

[Tim (PassMark)]

It isn't possible to adjust the network test parameters in BurnInTest. Did you have the duty cycle for the network test set to 100%?
Though based on testing here it still won't reach your requirements of 12 Mbit/s as we only saw about 6 Mbits/s.

You should be able to run the disk test on a network mounted partition as it does check for partitions using smbfs/cifs/nfs.
Was it mounted before you started BurnInTest? If so could you please start BurnInTest in debug mode (using the command line paramter -d) and send us a copy of the debug.log file after loading and opening the preferences for the disk test.

[Jacob Dixon]

Hi Tim, Thank you for your reply.

The network test was set to 100% duty cycle, perhaps my 1 MB/s was based system performance with other exercisers running.

Your notes on the disk test pointed me in the right direction. -- BurnInTest found them when I mounted them into /media/. Before I was using the Nautilus file manager, and I guess BurnInTest does not look where that file manager mounts drives. Each network port is now being exercised at a speed/rate that exceeds the standard referenced above.

Also another note, it seems BurnInTest will silently give up if there is a permissions issue with a network drive. I forgot to make the samba share folder writable on the server, and BurnInTest just removed the drive from the exercise list without notification.

Thank you again!
-Jacob