Hi,

You’d likely ideally want some kind of harness to run iperf, and perhaps other 
tools, over time and squirrel the results to a database with a useful viewer 
and alerting system.

What we use for this, in a very different scenario of measuring network 
characteristics between university networks, e.g., those participating in the 
CERN experiments, is perfSONAR. It’s an open source package that can measure 
throughput, loss, latency, and path over time, and has support to allow you to 
configure ‘meshes’ of tests between specific servers, controlled from a single 
central config file, with the mesh results viewable via Grafana (soon, in 5.1, 
we’re at 5.1 beta now).

It’s not clear though that you could install such a tool in your environment, 
or add small form factor servers to run it, or be able to run such servers even 
as containers. So this answer may be quite unhelpful, apologies if so.  It 
requires servers at each measurement point, rather than running tests over time 
from a single point.

The loss/latency tests use OWAMP, running fairly continuously.  You can also 
configure iperf2 or iperf3 tests to run periodically, by default every 6 hours 
for 30 seconds.

See https://www.perfsonar.net/ if interested, and there’s a very helpful user 
list at https://lists.internet2.edu/sympa/info/perfsonar-user.

Tim

On 5 Apr 2024, at 05:30, Grahvendy, Patrick (Cobar - AU) 
<patrick.grahve...@metalsacqcorp.com> wrote:

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Greetings Iperf folk

I’m responsible for a remote control system for heavy earth moving equipment in 
an underground mining environment. The system consists of:


  1.  Windows PC on the surface as the main control unit
  2.  4 remote control stations – 1 on the surface, 3 underground
  3.  Numerous access barrier boxes – controlling laser barrier safety systems
  4.  Numerous Wifi access points – to connect the loaders to the network
  5.  4 underground earth moving front end loaders – equipped with Wifi machine 
clients


Interconnections between all the fixed hardware consist of fibre optic lines to 
various network switches placed at different levels underground. From those 
network switches we use Cat6 ethernet cabling to the end devices.

1,2,3 and 5 above all contain a PLC unit which interfaces DC control signals to 
IP data. If connection is lost between any of these devices the system goes 
into an immediate fail safe and shuts the machine in operation down.

The issue I’m having is lost packet data intermittently causing this shutdown 
condition.

Running various continuous pings from the surface control PC to different IP 
address locations underground I can determine roughly where the unreliable 
connections are.

Can Iperf be configured to run continuously, say over several hours, and 
provide more specific feedback on where the system is losing integrity?

Any feedback or insight gratefully appreciated.


Regards,

Patrick Grahvendy
AutoMine Specialist


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