Discussion list for thrulay, a network testing tool

[Peter Daum <>]

Trying to improve network thruput for some servers, I am just experimenting
 with the linux bonding driver. Thrulay would be pretty handy for measuring
 the results. In this context, I ran into a strange problem:
 
 Most of my machines have a own local firewall that blocks most incoming
 traffic, but allows connections that were initiated by the machine itself via
 connection tracking.
 When I run thrulayd on a machine without any packet filter and 2 gigabit
 ethernet interfaces bound together and connect from a machine with such
 a firewall, thrulay shows a thruput that is ~50% oon the average and highly
 variable. Obviously, this is due to response packets from the thrulay server
 being thrown away by the firewall. Since it is a locally initiated tcp
 connection (that also shows up in /proc/net/ip_conntrack) the packets
 should normally be allowed by the firewall.
 The same thing with a server without interface bonding works
 without any problem. When I shutdown the firewall on the client, it also works o.k.
 It also seems, that this is specifically an issue with thrulay:
 When I check a similar setting with netcat, the firewall also shows some
 dropped packets, but the data rate is about as expected.
 
 Does anybody have an idea, what is going on here?
 
 Regards,
                                       Peter Daum

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