[olug] Active bandwidth monitoring

[Daniel Linder]

I'm trying to pro-actively monitor the "real world" speed that I'm getting
with my @Work connection.

Unfortunately Googling for "bandwidth monitoring" brings up programs that
will monitor traffic already going through the machines interfaces, not
actively probing a set of remote sites.

In a perfect world the application would have a list sites to download a
test file from, compute the average, and store the details in a RRD file
for later review.  As another idea, the "list of sites" could be a set of
"random Google/Yahoo/MSN/etc links" -- a better "real world" test?

Questions:
1: Has anyone run across a tool like this that is free and will run on Linux?
2: If I stared to write something like this, has anyone got some Perl code
to grab random URLs from a search engine?

Dan

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