[CentOS] looking for ideas about how to create a constant data stream

Sat May 30 10:46:02 UTC 2020
Anand Buddhdev <anandb at ripe.net>

On 30/05/2020 12:32, hw at 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.

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.

Regards,
Anand