On Saturday, May 30, 2020 12:46:02 PM CEST you wrote:
On 30/05/2020 12:32, hw@gc-24.de wrote:
Hi hw,
I'm looking for a good way to create a constant data stream that will occupy a bandwidth of about 2--5Mbit/sec between two remote hosts over the internet. I have full access to the hosts involved.
My first attempt to use scp to copy data from /dev/null on host A to /dev/null on host B, but scp says '/dev/null: not a regular file'. If something like that would work, I would be able to limit the bandwidth of this transfer in the router(s) involved so that it won't occupy all the bandwidth.
You can't read from /dev/null. You get nothing from it. You're better off using /dev/random, for example. That will give you a continuous stream of random bytes.
Oh, ok, yes, of course, that makes sense :)
However, that's not the focus of this. You want a sustain a stream of packets between two hosts. You're better off using UDP for this. And a good tool for generating such packets would be "iperf". It can measure bandwidth between two nodes more accurately.
Hm, iperf came to mind, and I looked at the manpage again. It doesn't seem to have a way to transmit/receive indefinitely, though it seems it has basically everything I'm looking for except for unlimited transfers. I'll try it out; I can always look at the source code and try to do about something about the limit if I need to.