speed test in ports?

[Chuck Swiger]

On Jan 11, 2010, at 9:45 AM, David Banning wrote:
> I wonder if there is something in the ports that tests my DSL speed. 
> I am guessing that if I installed firefox3 and then installed flash
> or Java then I could go to speedtest.net, but I wonder if there is 
> a simpler solution.

You can use ftp or fetch from the base system to test downloads of some reasonably large files, and get a decent estimate of your bandwidth (or that of the server, depending on which is lower).

However, the network-based tests from your ISP, speedtest.net, dslreports.com, etc including the tweak test often provide useful information about MTU, dropped packets, tweaking TCP window size, etc, so a browser-based test is a good approach.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck