Feature Requests?

greenspun.com : LUSENET : ISP Quality-of-Service Monitor : One Thread

Do you have any requests for features that you want added to the status monitor? If so, answer the question here with your request and I'll see what I can do about it.

Cheers, Justin

-- Justin Chan (jc@iah.net), May 14, 2000

Answers

Warlord:

Yes it is possible, and it has been done. The "official" scheme of the connection status pages is black and white, but uniken has customised his page a bit so that the OK tables show up in green.

To do this, you just edit the client script and look for places where it prints HTML to a file. You can then edit the HTML it prints there. You need to replace quotes with backslash-quote like this " -> \", and the @ and $ signs with backslashes as well (\@ and \$).

I'd appreciate it if you didnt play with the actual text of the page, because the server uses the text to parse the aggregate data.

Other nodes have added stuff like links and counter images on their pages as well. I'm fine with all that.

Cheers, Justin

-- Justin Chan (jc@iah.net), May 15, 2000.


Alex -

Doing something like that would be nice, but to get any meaningful speeds filesizes of 200-500k would be needed. Assuming that our 7 nodes each download 200k from Australia and the US every 15 minutes, in one day that would equal 268 Mb of data retrieved from the sites. In one month thats 8.3 gig of network traffic.

Plus, the file transfer rate would only be meaningful for that one particular site. A transfer rate of 20k/sec (I wish) from cdrom.com or metalab wont translate very well into how fast you can surf the web at.

The current ping statistics give a ballpark figure as to what speeds you can expect, but even then, are fairly rough (see the help page and "a note on accuracy"). I'm not sure that having a transfer rate in bytes/second helps that much.

One possible, although very inaccurate solution may be to figure out the size of each ping packet (I think they are 56 data bytes + headers and other junk), and then work out how many bytes are pushed through the link in one second based on the ping time.

I'll do a few calculations tomorrow and see if it's accurate, I doubt it though :(

Cheers, Justin

-- Justin Chan (jc@iah.net), May 15, 2000.


Hi Justin,

An idea for a new graph type could be one that tests bandwidth available to sites. Maybe you could have the script download a relatively small file (eg. 500 kilobytes), and report on the speed in kilobytes/second of the resulting transfer. You could have one graph for high-bandwidth Autralian sites (eg. mirror.aarnet.edu.au), and another for US sites (eg. ftp.cdrom.com, metalab.unc.edu and ftp.microsoft.com).

I know this is a bit more resource-intensive than a simple ping, but could give not only current performance information, but also guidelines for cable users as to what sort of download rates they can expect.

-- Alex Brak (alexbrak@hotmail.com), May 15, 2000.


Hi, I am currently testing a croned status thingy every 10 minutes and i will probably email you to add me as a test node.

But more to the point, I would really be impressed by some colouring on the individual node tests (? is this possible ?). I dont know much about Perl but your thing is cool as Optus@Home keeps stuffing up on my machine.

Thanks, WarLord

-- WarLord (Wiseyoda@death-star.com), May 15, 2000.


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