On Saturday, May 30, 2020 12:46:02 PM CEST you wrote: > 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. 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.