Soft Ethernet BER Tester Tool

First of all, if you read through this group's archive, you will find that there is no such thing as a 'NIC BERT'.

But for what you want to do: most NIC chipset manufacturers supply a test utility that will pull this trick for you. (e.g. Realtek: REALDIAG.exe)

Above sounds a fine plan.

If for some reason that does not suit you could as an alternative consider sending frames and seeing if they arrive correctly. Ethernet checks for bad frames so all you have to do is to send frames and count how many arrive.

This clearly does not return the BER directly.

I am also not sure what you expect to see.

Here is a random port on a LAN. Well I know is was a busy one but no special selection was made regarding error rate.

sw2#sh int gi 3/22 counters

Port InBytes InUcastPkts InMcastPkts InBcastPkts Gi3/22 4419807352991 8817575501 206740 44197

Port OutBytes OutUcastPkts OutMcastPkts OutBcastPkts Gi3/22 1260741405328 4961991888 61575480 35987515 sw2#sh int gi 3/22 counters err

Port CrcAlign-Err Dropped-Bad-Pkts Collisions Symbol-Err Gi3/22 0 0 0 0

Port Undersize Oversize Fragments Jabbers Gi3/22 0 0 0 0

Port Single-Col Multi-Col Late-Col Excess-Col Gi3/22 0 0 0 0

Port Deferred-Col False-Car Carri-Sen Sequence-Err Gi3/22 0 0 0 0

That's 40,000G bits with no errors of any kind!!! This is a copper GBE port running at 1000Mbps.

Tools for sending a lot of packets and checking if they arrive are:-

iperf this is like ttcp but a bit reworked ttcp fping.exe

- not too easy to find hence the reference.