Overview:

This article is intended for administrators who need to verify that they have UDP connectivity between two systems. Since there are multiple tools for testing UDP connectivity a few of them are explained here. This article covers the following utilities for testing UDP connectivity: iperf and netcat.

Option 1: iperf

Iperf is a free client server utility that can be used to validate UDP connectivity and throughput.

• iperf can be downloaded here - https://iperf.fr/iperf-download.php

Server setup: Run iperf to listen for UDP traffic on port 33001

  iperf -s -p 33001 -u

On the client: Send to the server machine that's listening for UDP on port 33001 (in this case IP 10.0.101.49) at 10 Mbps:

  iperf -c 10.0.101.49 -u -p 33001 -b 10M  

Option 2: Netcat

Netcat is the Swiss Army knife of networking utilities.

• On Linux and Mac OS X systems netcat is usually already available or it can be installed as: 
  • [Linux] yum install nc
  • [Mac]   brew install nc
• For Windows you can download it here: http://joncraton.org/files/nc111nt.zip (password is "nc")

On the server run netcat in listen mode (-l) and specify UDP (-u) and the port (33001):

  # nc -l -u 33001  

On the client specify UDP (-u) and provide the server IP address and port that the server is listening to:

  # nc -u ip_address 33001