Verifying VPN Performance & Setup
Once your NanoPing VPN is established, it is essential to verify connectivity, measure throughput performance, and ensure correct routing. The following guides detail different methods for testing and configuring your tunnel.
1. Bandwidth Testing: Iperf2
While an older tool, Iperf2 remains valuable for testing multi-threaded performance and specific UDP scenarios that newer versions handle differently. Use this to stress-test the tunnel's maximum throughput capacity.
- Best For: Legacy environments, multi-threaded UDP testing.
- Key Metric: Maximum throughput (Mbps/Gbps).
2. Bandwidth Testing: Iperf3
Iperf3 is the modern industry standard for active measurements of the maximum achievable bandwidth on IP networks. It provides a detailed analysis of the tunnel's performance, including packet loss and jitter statistics, without the multi-threading complexity of Iperf2.
- Best For: Standard bandwidth verification, jitter analysis, packet loss checks.
- Key Metric: Throughput, Jitter (ms), Retransmissions.
3. Connectivity & Latency: Ping
The simplest and most immediate way to verify that your VPN tunnel is passing traffic. This guide explains how to use ICMP echo requests to verify reachability between peers and measure the Round-Trip Time (RTT) of the encrypted link.
- Best For: Connectivity health checks, latency measurement.
- Key Metric: Round-Trip Time (RTT).
4. Routing & NAT: IP Tables Setup
Creating the TUN interface is only the first step. To route traffic from a LAN or the Internet through the NanoPing VPN, you must configure packet forwarding and Network Address Translation (NAT) rules. This guide covers the essential iptables commands for Linux environments.
- Best For: Configuring gateways, enabling internet access through VPN, NAT masquerading.
- Key Concept:
POSTROUTING,MASQUERADE.