Heratech

http://iperf.sourceforge.net/

iperf is a tool for testing network transfer speeds. From its sourceforge page:

'Iperf was developed by NLANR/DAST as a modern alternative for measuring maximum TCP and UDP bandwidth performance. Iperf allows the tuning of various parameters and UDP characteristics. Iperf reports bandwidth, delay jitter, datagram loss.'

Quick start:

iperf -s on server
iperf -c hostname (or ip of server) on client. Use -f to change the format.

Most of the time, when people say they have a networking issue, I suggest updating the firmware. This time I suggest downgrading.

Since installing a DG834G at home my online gaming has been abysmal. I spent some time playing about with port forwarding/upnp etc but no luck. A quick search online showed a few forum entries where people mentioned the firmware I was using (the latest) seemed to be the cause. I downgraded from version 5.01.14 to 5.01.09 - immediate improvement.
Strange but true.

My Ubuntu laptop and PC could not ping my windows machines until I installed winbind (sudo apt-get install winbind) and then added wins to the end of my hosts line in /etc/nsswitch.conf (sudo nano -w /etc/nsswitch.conf).

My hosts line read:

hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4 wins