Using Traffic Control Monitor (TCMon) to simulate slow-link or dial-up connections

Traffic Control Monitor (TCMon) is a tool used to interact with the windows Quality of Service (QOS) Provider in the Windows Networking component.  By adjusting the settings in QOS, TCMon is able to do some really amazing simulations such as:

• Control network bandwidth on Ethernet connections to simulate 56k dial-up, ISDN, etc.
• Increase/Reduce packet delay
• Add/Remove packet loss  

Installation

TCMon is included in the Resource Kit Tools for Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003. The Server 2003 kit can be downloaded at https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd.

After downloading the kit, run the installation package and install the tools.  After installation, goto the install folder (usually C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools) and run tcmon.bat.  This installs the TCMon kernel driver and configures the components required to control the network connection.

TCMon requires that QOS Service be enabled to control connection speed.  Goto Control Panel > Network Connections and right click on the network connection to ensure QOS is enabled. 

Running TCMon

Assuming installation goes smoothly, we can configure TCMon to control our network connections. There are two very important things to note:

1. All settings are lost on Reboot
2. All settings are lost when the user logs on or off

Q & A

If you find this useful, drop me a line. 

 

 

tcmon.GIF

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 06, 2008
  Hi, I installed TCMon, but I don't understand how to use it. Can you add a short description of the configuration needed for simulating a dial-up connection.

• Anonymous
  February 22, 2011
  Did you ever find out how to use this, PBY?  I'm interested in throttling the connection on one of my servers to simulate a slow connection I might experience in my production environment.

• Anonymous
  October 10, 2012
  The comment has been removed