I forgot to mention. 1 tremendous advantage to netcat: SPEED. This is the only "real-world" way to test line speed. 0 overhead, no faffing about services. I

I forgot to mention. 1 tremendous advantage to netcat: SPEED. This is the only "real-world" way to test line speed. 0 overhead, no faffing about services. If you can't get line-rate speed on your LAN with this your hardware needs to be looked at. iperf is handy, netcat is raw and real.