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                        GENERAL ARTICLES
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                   Measuring the InterNet, Sam Knows.
                   By Michiel van der Vlist, 2:280/5555


Presently I am involved in two projects that attempt to chart global
internet performance. I am involved because these projects make use of
volunteers and I stepped forward. These projects are the SamKnows
project initiated and sponsored by the European Commission and the
RIPE Atlas project initiated and funded by RIPE-NCC.

Both project use special hardware installed at the user's premises.
For the SamKnows project it is a so called white box that acts as a
five port switch. It is a modified T-Link wireless router. The RIPE
Atlas project uses a "probe" that has to be plugged in a spare port on
a switch in the user's LAN.

The Samknows white box has been running for about a week now, the RIPE
Atlas probe for just two days, so I will write about that next week.
This week's article will be dedicated to SamKnows.

http://www.samknows.eu

The goal of the project is to collect data about broadband performance
across Europe. The aim is to have over 10.000 whiteboxes installed.
The project runs for two years. If you jump in, you have to agree to
keep the Whitebox running 24/7 for the duration of the project or
return it. At the end of the project you may keep the hardware and do
with it whatever you like.

If you sign up, you are asked to agree to the terms and when you do,
you will usually receive a confirmation within a day or so. If your
request is honoured, you will get the whitebox in about ten days.
Installation is easy. Just put it between your main router and the
wired equipment in your LAN. When the whitebox is running it will
"phone home" and start running tests. You will get an e-mail with a
user name and password to login to the web page where you can see the
test results.

The whitebox monitors your LAN for activity. It does not spy on you,
it just detects activity in order to avoid running tests when your
inernet connection is busy. It is not a wireless access point. The
radio part is only used to detect if there is WiFi activity on your
LAN's subnet, again to avoid running tests when your internet
connection is busy.

SamKnows claims it is not monitoring you. If you do not believe it, it
is an open source project. You can have a look at the source.


The SamKnows Whitebox currently performs the following tests:

1  Multi-threaded HTTP download speed test
2  Multi-threaded HTTP based upload speed test
3  Availability of the connection
4  Jitter
5  Latency (both ICMP and UDP)
6  Packet loss (both ICMP and UDP)
7  DNS query resolution time
8  DNS query failure rate
9  Web page loading time
10 Web page loading failure rate
11 Video streaming performance

These are the results of the downstream test for a 3 day period:
The speeds are in Mbps.


Date                    Min     Max     Ave   #test


2012-02-09 21:00:00     9.49    9.49    9.49    1
2012-02-09 20:00:00     9.47    9.47    9.47    1
2012-02-09 19:00:00     9.49    9.49    9.49    1
2012-02-09 15:00:00     9.49    9.49    9.49    1
2012-02-09 09:00:00     9.54    9.54    9.54    1
2012-02-09 03:00:00     10.21   10.21   10.21   1
2012-02-09 00:00:00     9.51    9.51    9.51    1
2012-02-08 23:00:00     9.52    9.52    9.52    1
2012-02-08 22:00:00     8.92    8.92    8.92    1
2012-02-08 21:00:00     9.44    9.44    9.44    1
2012-02-08 20:00:00     9.21    9.21    9.21    1
2012-02-08 19:00:00     9.56    9.56    9.56    1
2012-02-08 15:00:00     9.51    9.51    9.51    1
2012-02-08 09:00:00     9.55    9.55    9.55    1
2012-02-08 03:00:00     8.98    8.98    8.98    1
2012-02-08 00:00:00     9.47    9.47    9.47    1
2012-02-07 23:00:00     8.98    8.98    8.98    1
2012-02-07 22:00:00     8.82    8.82    8.82    1
2012-02-07 21:00:00     9.49    9.49    9.49    1
2012-02-07 20:00:00     9.48    9.48    9.48    1
2012-02-07 19:00:00     9.65    9.65    9.65    1
2012-02-07 15:00:00     9.49    9.49    9.49    1
2012-02-07 09:00:00     10.50   10.50   10.50   1
2012-02-07 03:00:00     9.52    9.52    9.52    1
2012-02-07 00:00:00     9.45    9.45    9.45    1
2012-02-06 23:00:00     10.20   10.20   10.20   1
2012-02-06 22:00:00     9.45    9.45    9.45    1
2012-02-06 21:00:00     9.03    9.03    9.03    1
2012-02-06 20:00:00     9.32    9.32    9.32    1
2012-02-06 19:00:00     9.52    9.52    9.52    1


My ISP (cable form Ziggo) promised 10 Mbps and as you can see the
results are pretty close and stable. Don't ask me why they present
min, max and average for only one test, but that's how it is.

Not all have such nice test results. Ward Dossche and Steven Leeman
are also participating and their results are not by far as stable and
close to the promised speed as mine. This may be due to various
reasons. For one, Ward is on DSL, not cable and he has family of heavy
lurkers, weher I am basically a light user and there are no teenagers
in the house.


What I am a bit disappointed about is that I "only" got a TL-WR741ND
which has 100 Mbps ports. Ward and Steven got a TL-WR1043ND that has 1
Gbps ports. My whitebox is now a bottleneck for upgrading my LAN to
Gbit, so I have requested to swap mine for a model with gbit ports as
well. Just submitted it, so no answer yet.

What they don't mention in the user instructions is that the whitebox
needs to get an IPv4 (local) address by DHCP. So you must have a DHCP
server active on your LAN. It's IP address is pingable but there is no
user accessible web interface. It does have an ssh server at port 2222
though, but I have not found the password yet...

I haven't delved into the inner workings any further. For one because
I promised not to do so and secondly because I figured I will cross
that bridge when I get to it. When I want to do someothing more with
it than just deploy it as a 5 port switch, it will have to be
reflashed with either the original T-Link firmware or Openwrt or the
likes. I have already found some pointers on the internet on how to do
this, and surely more will be known in two years. Or maybe Samknows
will just give us the info on how to reflash it.

The Whitebox is completely oblivious to IPv6, but it does not
interfere with with it either, so no problem there.


Next week: the RIPE Atlas project.
http://atlas.ripe.net


Thanks to Steven Leeman for drawing my attention to these projects.


© Michiel van der Vlist, all rights reserved.
Permission to publish in the FIDONEWS file echo and the FIDONEWS
discussion echo as originating from 2:2/2


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