NZ Broadband testing from Samknows

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#2091682 16-Sep-2018 20:42

So had to do a bit of juggling around at home and plugged it in this afternoon I can keep an eye on what it is up to.

- Box is based on OpenWRT/LEDE as per what I found on github. https://github.com/SamKnows

- Phones home to the main NTP Samknows server over http to get time (rather than using NTP) and then the DCS server in the UK which is their command and control server. Uses a private SSL Certificate rather than a public one so I assume the image has that same cert embedded into it to stop people doing bad things with the testing.

UDP Latency tests across multiple probes:

- Does a lot of DNS requests across the globe to ispmon.samknows.mlab1v4.xxxyy.measurement-lab.org where xxx is the country code and yy is the number of the probe ie akl01 for NZ. Then runs a udp test to the end point to measure latency and jitter I suspect.

Download tests:

- 8 threaded TCP download test over HTTP for around 10 seconds with a 1 second ramp up but tries to download a file 1000MB.bin from the above ispmon.samknows local site.

- 8 threaded TCP upload test using a POST /1000MB.bin?CONTROL=1....

Site downloads:

- Then hits a number of common websites over mostly HTTPS so can't really see what It is doing. www.google.co.nz/www.facebook.com/www.youtube.com/www.trademe.co.nz/nz.yahoo.com/www.stuff.co.nz(really?)/www.nzherald.co.nz/www.amazon.com/www.wikipedia.com/www.twitter.com for http sites it seems they do a download with the Firefox User Agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.1\r\n" so I assume they do a CURL/WGET get the full "desktop" site and produce timings on that.

So it looks like they are doing all the right things. My line is terrible as I am right on the edge of VDSL coverage but it does show up the jitter and packet loss due to having a poor upstream connection (22mb down and 800kb, but more like 400-500kb up)

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#2091799 17-Sep-2018 10:49

One interesting artifact I saw is looking into the dashboard I only see stats for yesterday and nothing from today. Change to the Daily or 7 Day view and it is only showing yesterdays data.

Not sure if this is a timezone thing based on UTC or UK Local time.

Anyone else noticed this?

Also found this on OpenWRT: https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/samknows/sk-wb8

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#2091984 17-Sep-2018 14:46

And a further update, my pcap has been running since yesterday and the probe has generated 750MB of traffic on my 22MB VDSL connection while no one was at home today.

Seems to ping 7 IP addresses over UDP port 6000 every second. Granted it's only a 16 byte UDP payload so a total packet size of 60 bytes but still, on my small upstream it has a tangible impact.

freitasm

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#2091988 17-Sep-2018 14:58

I wonder how much of an impact this box has on overall Internet - as in usually people would expect some times of the day to be "quiet" when now traffic will be competing for those much needed bits. Sure there's a minimum allocated for each users but still...

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#2092049 17-Sep-2018 16:38

And further update, checking out the trace overnight they played this YouTube video 3 times.

Had a further look through the trace and it downloads a selection of IDs, but always seems to play the first one.

2n2t7ww46mI
WFssTjrIARE
q9qZveIjXp4
XD_Jgljk92g
8JWuWPRsSvg
eH7QgHs3ZrE
MZEsHLfF9HY
puL37Rl0UuU
uunpGtHDuWw
8FJEtCvb2Kw
2v7B8cDgJyc
pKk6FMAsZCA
NyieFVTxfbQ
SGG414iGoGE
PVnTrPjo7eA
ycPr5-27vSI
GsBe5qRVz-0

Some amusing videos in there....

freitasm

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#2092051 17-Sep-2018 16:39

Wouldn't it be funny if the video received a DMCA notice and was taken down?

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#2092349 18-Sep-2018 09:52

I wonder if they are selling the views to get a second revenue stream?

Richard rich.ms

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#2092467 18-Sep-2018 12:30

richms:

I wonder if they are selling the views to get a second revenue stream?

SamKnows replied to my email asking them about it, as I would have expected they randomise between the list.

we currently just play the first video and failover to the second (and so on) if the first is blocked or has been removed. In the future we _may_ switch to using a reference video that we know is always available, will not be removed and will be available at the highest quality (e.g. 4K currently, maybe 8K in the future)

GreensladeNZ

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#2092553 18-Sep-2018 13:53

Mine just arrived today!

Glad I found this thread, I did have some concerns about privacy but it seems you have already looked into it.
Just set it up between our pfSense Box and switch, it'll be seeing all of our traffic, WiFi included.

Looking forward to seeing the results! (2degrees Gigatown Plan)

Packetmike

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#2092643 18-Sep-2018 15:58

I received my SamKnows box on Saturday, plugged it in, but it didn't attempt any download testing over the following 48 hours.

I have a wireless security camera generating a constant wifi usage - I had to disconnect this before SamKnows started to attempt download tests.

Since then though the download tests have been all over the place - peak times seem the best, and off peak is the worst :) its almost like they are testing against a northern hemisphere server...anyone else noticed that?

I am on VDSL, my usual Ookla testing is about 50-60Mbps

adimw

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#2092660 18-Sep-2018 16:18

Mine only seems to be every second day?!

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hio77

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#2092674 18-Sep-2018 16:29

195ms would indicate be in line with it being hosted in NA/EU

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cruxis

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#2092705 18-Sep-2018 17:40

Takes a while for it to learn your traffic, Mine did not do tests for 7 days, because of the low 64kbps, traffic threshold.

michaelmurfy

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#2092721 18-Sep-2018 18:20

Just plugged in my SamKnows probe now. I am really in need of a proper network rack in my next house...

Michael Murphy | https://murfy.nz
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#2092725 18-Sep-2018 18:23

michaelmurfy:
Just plugged in my SamKnows probe now. I am really in need of a proper network rack in my next house...

I know a guy who could help.

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