Okay, so I wanted to get into some network testing, and I heard about TRex. It’s supposed to be this super powerful traffic generator. I figured I’d try setting up a simple side-by-side test to see how it works.
Getting Started
First things first, I needed to get TRex. I grabbed the latest version, and did the whole extraction thing. I have some old servers sitting around, just collecting dust, so I figured I’d use two of them. One would be the TRex server, and the other would be the client…or, well, the thing getting blasted with traffic.
The Setup Struggle
Honestly, this is where I spent most of my time. Figuring out the configuration. TRex uses YAML files, and while they’re not super complicated, it’s a lot of details. I had to make sure my network interfaces were named correctly. And then the IP addresses… oh, the IP addresses.
I ended up with a basic setup like this:
- Server (TRex): One network interface, let’s call it “eth1”, with an IP like 10.0.0.1.
- Client: One interface, “eth1” again, with IP 10.0.0.2.
Simple, right? But getting the config file to reflect that… that took some trial and error. I’m pretty sure I messed up the subnet masks a few times. Made some pretty graphs, though, before I realized my mistake.
Running the Test
Once I finally got the config sorted, running the test was actually pretty easy. I used a basic traffic profile, some pre-made thing that came with TRex. I wanted to see how the client machine handled a decent amount of traffic, not melt it down completely.
I fired up TRex on the server, pointed it at my config file, and boom. Traffic started flowing. It was actually pretty cool to see the stats scrolling by, showing the packets per second, bandwidth usage, all that good stuff.
Watching the Results
On the client machine, I just used some regular system monitoring tools. You know, see how the CPU usage looked, how much network traffic it was actually seeing. I wasn’t trying to do anything super precise, just get a general feel for how things were working.
Turns out, even with a basic traffic profile, TRex can really push some data. My old client machine was definitely feeling it. The CPU spiked, and the network interface was pegged. But it held up! That’s what I wanted to see. No crashes, no weird errors, just a lot of traffic.
Wrapping Up
So, that was my first adventure with TRex. It was definitely a learning experience. I learned a ton about network interfaces, configuration, and how to make a server sweat. My simple side-by-side test showed me the power of TRex, and now I am looking forward to exploring all the other things that I can use to for!