A few days ago I was wondering if the link between two remote hosts was 100Mbps or 1Gbps, and didn't have root access to run ethtool (sidenote: is there an easi

A few days ago I was wondering if the link between two remote hosts was 100Mbps or 1Gbps, and didn't have root access to run ethtool (sidenote: is there an easier way for an unprivileged user to determine this?), so out came netcat and dd: host1$ dd if=/dev/zero | nc host2 5432 host2$ nc -l 5432 > /dev/null Let it run for a moment and then ctrl-C'd host1; the stats dd printed on exit gave a pretty clear answer to my question.