Re: wanted: 'beacon' hosts ?

[Jared Mauch <jared () puck Nether net>]

On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 11:21:14AM -0400, Marshall Eubanks wrote:
> > Can anyone help (reciprocally would be fine) by providing permission to use
> > ICMP Echo and HTTP GET requests against something on their network (that is
> > well connected and reliable) so that I can build SLA-targetted averages for
> > performance and packet loss ?
> >
> > PPS If people are willing to offer this as a 'public' service, I will
> > happily summarise back to the list and/or build a web site with details.
> >
> > Peter
>
> Dear Peter;
>
> There is software and a program to do this.
>
> 1.) Multicast enable your network.

        Good plan no matter what.

> 2.) Install AccessGrid / NLANR beacons :
> http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/beacon/

        Useful for rtt, etc..

> 3.) Monitor away :
> http://beaconserver.accessgrid.org:9999/

        This doesn't solve the http://get/

        part of the situation.

good idea:
        Someone with a fast machine with reasonable memory+time to insure
the scheduler is used properly could do something like the following

        install vmware on a host machine (www.vmware.com)

        set up a few 'virtual' machines, insure they can not use more
than X% of the overall cpu
        set up rate-limit on upstream router (or similar router
configuration commands) to prevent user from abusing the link.

        you could then install (linux|(Open|Net|Free)BSD|Win(95|98|NT|2k|me))
within the guest machine and set it up to have a seperate ip address and
let people run whatever they desired.

        Obviously there are a few disk space, and memory as well as other
resource allocation issues on the 'host' machine, but they can be
resolved fairly easy.

        This would allow people that want to do this to offer many OS'es
on a single machine.  (ideally for free for people to do interesting traffic
matrix things).

        I am going to ignore the tcpdump/packet sniffing abilities of 
each virtual machine to talk to each other as well as the other
security aspects of this idea.  obviously you want the people involved
to be 'trusted' sufficently to offer these services.

        One could always generate some software daemons that can be
connected to that perform these exact tasks also.  the vmware idea is
neat because you can offer access to development tools and customize
rate-limits, etc on a per-IP basis and do some interesting
things as far as network testing.

        - jared



-- 
Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from jared () puck nether net
clue++;      | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/  My statements are only mine.