Notes

[bjones1]

I'm using this "issue" to keep notes on my thoughts on creating a Raspberry Pi-based network bandwidth measurement tool.

Goals

implement the NIST First Responder UAS Triple Challenge part 3.2. Page 17 of the rules includes:

Approach

The iPerf tool provides a client/server combo to do network bandwidth testing. Notes:

• The most obvious link provides a download page, but this is for old code (c. 2016). The GitHub repo shows that the codebase is being actively developed.
• The old binaries page shows that there are binaries for Android and iOS. Ideally, we would use binaries based on code in its current form. However:
  • This means (at a minimum) installing the Android NDK. Here are slightly old build instructions.
  • I'm not sure what the status of the iOS port is. There's a client for iOS based on old code.
  • I'm assuming that Linux distros use up-to-date code. For example, sudo apt install iperf3; iperf3 --version produces iperf 3.7 (cJSON 1.5.2), which is code from mid-2019.
  • There's an older version of iPerf (the 2.x series) that is also maintained. I'm not sure if it support iOS / Android.

Networking setup

• For our internal testing / simple , it would be helpful to make the Pi an access point. For the actual setups, I assume that anything which routes traffic from the external Ethernet cable to the Pi would be fine.

Overall config

We need scripts to install iPerf 3, set up networking, run some sort of logging / data capture with iPerf, etc.

Objectives

From the meeting on 28-Feb-2022, we should:

• Run iPerf as a service / on startup.
• Capture iPerf output to logs.
• Get the image setup to run DNS.
• Build this as an ISO file to easy distribution.
• Run the lite version of Raspbian (command-line access, instead of X Windows). Target: 32 GB file drive.

[bjones1]

Actions

• There's a pre-built version of recent iperf3 from Termux. Install Terumux, then run:

  pkg update
  pkg upgrade
  pkg install iperf3

• There's a pre-built version of recent iperf3 for Windows from https://files.budman.pw/.
• To get recent iperf3 on the Pi, clone the repo then build it.

I was able to run iperf3 on Windows 10 as a server, then connect to it via an Android phone and run the iPerf3 client.