Verifying communication over a unidirectional IP path

A fellow engineer asked today about how to ping from one side of a one-way network connection to the other to make sure it worked. I thought I would post some ideas that I had found when I was trying to do the same thing.

The ping command would work, but only if you had some network monitoring software on the device on the other end that you were pinging because the ICMP echo replies can't get back to the pinging host. An Ibiquity document describes how to overcome this using some utilities supplied with their HD Radio equipment on pages 64 and 65 of this document.

In addition, one could also run NetCat on two computers, one sending data on intervals on one side and the other listening for data on the other side. There are Windows versions of Netcat available with a quick google search.

My personal favorite method was to set up VLC on one computer streaming some audio or video to the other side on a computer running VLC as the client.


Tags: radio engineering network hdradio