Free WAN Emulators?
ScottMan asks: "The company I work for is interested in WAN emulation software that does stuff like create false latency, random packet dropping, etc. After scouring every resource I know, I was able to find only one piece of software called The Cloud (at $4,000 a license) Does anyone know of ANY WAN emulation software that is GPL or similar?"
There is also an ns version 2 available.
I don't know if this is exactly what you're looking for, but it might help.
Free. Good.
http://snad.ncsl.nist.gov/itg/nistnet/
-troy
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
It was called "insane" and compiled as a kernel module.
It supports what you have asked for.
I've used it for just throttling and latency, but it supports packet dropping as well. Check it out.
I'm pretty sure the FreeBSD dummynet device can do this, I haven't configured it, but in the right kind of combination, (serial ethernet Token Ring ATM) interface/tunnel mixes, you could simulate PPP ,ring and broadcast technologies for WAN or LAN....
http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ip_dummynet/
FreeBSD has a feature called dummynet. It allows you to configure network pipes which allows you to limit bandwith, add latency and even packet loss. It's quite a nicely designed feature. You use the ipfw tool to configure it, and you use firewall rules to send traffic into the pipes, so you can controll which content you want to limit.
You can use it on the host you want to use, or you can easily build a FreeBSD gateway/router box and set things up there. More in formation is available at www.freebsd.org.
Terje Elde