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sysadmin > network

document updated 15 years ago, on Jan 29, 2009

After dabbling in network simulation software (usually for white-hat reasons, because it's a lot of work, and isn't often worth getting into), one starts to wonder if it's possible to have a "human IP stack", i.e. where any aspect of the network could be controlled by human inputs.

There's no trivial way to accomplish this. Network communications have very fast time-outs, far too fast for the best human to keep up with. So, the best one can hope for is an IP stack that has a vast number of user-configurable inputs, particularly in ways that may violate the TCP specs (useful for fault injection testing or stress testing, as well as black-hat packet injection).

Packages that claim to offer this sort of control:

Nemesis
of course, many network simulators would fit the bill
if you're a Perl whiz, there's always Net::RawIP (example usage)
nuff