siege: Backtrack: Stress Testing: Network Stress Testing: siege
Network stress testing is taken for granted sometimes however it is extremely useful in many aspects of a network. Typically when someone is thinking of stress testing something technology related they are thinking of stress testing a web application of some sort however it is beneficial to also stress test every piece of network hardware from the firewall to the web server that the application is running on to make sure there are no weaknesses once packets touch your network. With that said there are some great applications within Backtrack that provide stress testing capabilities such as siege which is classified as a HTTP/HTTPS Stress Tester which depending on the location you test from could also test network hardware between the Internet and the web server running the application being tested.