9.3. Microsoft Windows

Few of the tools described in this chapter are available for Windows. Those that are available include some of the more ambitious tools, however. In particular, ns and nam have downloadable binaries for Windows. According to the mgen documentation, a Windows "version may appear shortly." (netcat has also been ported to Windows.)

If you are interested in traffic generation for loading purposes, you might look to ipload. This is a very simple program that will flood a remote device with UDP packets. You can specify the destination address, destination port, packet rate, and packet payload. As the program runs, it will display a window with the elapsed time, the number of packets sent, the packet rate, and the number of bytes per second. ipload comes from BTT Software in the U.K. and requires no installation.

Several network-oriented benchmark programs available for Windows might also be of interest. In particular, you may want to look at NetBench, which can be downloaded from Ziff Davis's web site, http://etestinglabs.com/benchmarks/netbench/netbench.asp. It is designed to test client/server performance. You'll need to download both client and server versions of the software.

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