Re: Network stress testing

[xbud <xbud@g0thead.com>]

Hi Dale,

Stress testing networks can be quite tedious depending on what type of 'real 
simulation' you have to abide by.
If you have a budget take a look at an appliance called 'Flame Thrower' I 
forget who the vendor is ATM, but it was complete in regaurds to stress 
testing IDS's.  We used it at my old company about 2 years ago, and I'm sure 
it has been enhanced since.

If you have no budget and are just looking for a cheap solution (free 
opensource tools) then 'wget' for ftp / web traffic and tcpdump + tcpreplay 
are your friends with -nl options (this breaks real network traffic 
ofcourse).   I wrote several tools about 2 years ago ( I had just started 
coding then so excuse the poor code heh but they worked for me back then ;)  
SAT Tools on PacketStorm if you want to look at them.  

*Note - These are probably not feasable for dns stressing.

There are several other network appliances available for generating traffic at 
controlled speeds, but from my experience "Flame thrower" did quite well for  
IDS Stress testing as it has an API for integrating new attack simulations 
and has several modules already included in it.

-x
On Tuesday 22 April 2003 09:21, Dale Amon wrote:
> Would anyone have a recommendation for doing a stress
> test of a network? I've got a big show coming up and
> I'd like to set up re-produceable test procedures so
> I know how things respond under expected real life loads.
>
> I'm sure I've run across discussions of such tools
> but I can't remember any names.
>
> In particular I'd like to be able to hit a web server
> (and the local dns) with n requests/min to ensure
> it works, or if not to identify the weak spots.
>
> I'm doing googles in parallel with this query as
> I'm rather under stress testing myself at the
> moment, with a fixed deadline...