What Are We Working On?

• Testbed Reorganization (Summer 2006 - DONE) The ONL testbed was reorganized:
  • All of the end host OSes were upgraded from Linux 2.4 to Linux 2.6.9. We will likely upgrade again very soon to Linux 2.6.13. The main difference is that TCP has a different congestion control algorithm.
  • All plugins can now be cross compiled from the user's login host onlusr instead of remote compiling on a NetBSD host. All instances of Makefile in ~onl/stdPlugins/ have been up modified to account for this change. You will need to make two changes in every one of your plugin directories:
    • Replace all copies of stdinc.h with the new one in ~onl/stdPlugins/template/stdinc.h.
    • Replace all copies of Makefile with a new one. Copy ~onl/stdPlugins/template/Makefile to the plugin directory, and replace "<TEMPLATE>" with the plugin name (e.g., KMOD=COUNTER instead of KMOD=<TEMPLATE>).
    You can still make the object module combined.o by just enterring make. Also, you can now enter make debug to enable the MSRDEBUG macros instead of modifying the header file. There may be some additional minor modifications to the Makefile in the weeks ahead.
  • A firewall was installed. Traffic into the testbed is limited to a small number of services, and ALL traffic originating from within the testbed is DROPPED at the firewall. This means that you can push (pull) data into (from) the testbed from (to) your remote client, but you can not initiate connections from within the testbed to the outside.
  • The electronic patch panel is now implemented as a set of VLANs using gigabit ethernet switches instead of an ATM switch.
  The RLI still looks the same, but it will require getting a new jar file and a small change to the SSH tunnel. See the Getting Started page to get the new RLI and make changes to your SSH tunnel as described in RLI SSH Tunneling.
• Router Upgrade (Summer 2006) Various fixes to the FPX's will be made. These include:
  • Proper statistics from Exact Match filters and Route Table entries
  • Add the ability to match on TCP flags field when using General Match filters
  • Add sampling filters to auxiliary filters
• More Traffic Generators (Summer 2006) We are looking into traffic generators in addition to iperf.
• Course Material (Summer 2006) Complete tutorial pages with recipes, examples, demo gallery, code walks, etc. There's a lot there now, but we are continuing to expand the tutorial pages, especially Tutorial => Course Material. Two successful courses (one a UMass and one at Washington University) used the ONL during the Spring 2006 semester. The materials will be expanded.
• Linux 2.6 and Other End Host OSes (Late Summer and Fall 2006) We have upgraded end hosts to Linux 2.6.9. It is likely that we will upgrade to Linux 2.6.13 very soon. During the Fall, we will be looking into using Xen on our end hosts to support multiple OSes.
• Network Processor Routers (2007) We will be adding new routers based on Intel's IXP network processors to the ONL testbed. This will mean that network processor plugins and even the routing code itself can be modified by the user and experiments run through the RLI using the existing paradigm.

Definitions

• Test Mode: May be turned on and off.
• Beta: Should be better than Test Mode.

What's New?

• If you encounter problems with the testbed or have requests, send email to testbed-ops@onl.arl.wustl.edu .
• New RLI (June 8, 2006):
  The current RLI jar file is here . All older jar files are invalid. You should first read the new Getting Started page. Note: It is important that you save your configuration/experiment files before switching to this version of the RLI because the formats are different.