alright… networking pros… need to pick your brains on something that might be second nature for most of you.
I have two WLANs configured at home and I suspect that one of the networks is starting to perform poorly in terms of experiencing packet loss. This is annoying to the extent that last week I was uploading files to a remote server through FTP and the executables weren’t running on the server. After an hour of troubleshooting, just for the heck of it, I switched my wireless connection and re-uploaded everything and voila! everything was working fine.
So, my question is, what’s a reliable way to get a handle on why this might be happening? Is my network equipment at the end of its life? What performance metrics can I use to measure the effectiveness of one network over the other. I have tried a couple of online “speed tests” and such and it shows me that there’s 2% packet loss on the culprit network and relatively more jitter and latency as well. What else should I look for?
Re: suggestions for definitive WLAN connection testing
you could run a udp iperf between two nodes connected to the same wlan AP. and compare how different the results are for the two APs. they shouldn't be too different.
if they are, it could mean the worse one is dying (most likely the rf front end, time to toss it), or has done a bad job of picking a clean wireless channel and is trying to talk over too much interference/noise. restarting it should enable it to pick a cleaner channel.
Re: suggestions for definitive WLAN connection testing
Even if there was packet loss then shouldn't it be resending those packets ?? Well my networking skills are only as good as my pashto , so never mind if I sound dumb :)
Btw once I was uploading an executable on my school server and it was keep adding something in the end of the file . Later on I came to know that it was some firewall thingy to protect the server .
Re: suggestions for definitive WLAN connection testing
The packet lost may be corrupting the files. But if you're using FTP it might be how you're uploading the files. If you were using the cmd-line ftp you have to make sure you upload binaries in the binary mode or it goes up in ascii format and you can't execute them.
. Meanwhile y’all discuss.