What Are We Working On Now?

• Virtual Switches (March 2009) Soon, you will be able to add a virtual switch that can connect together some number of hosts to form a subnet.
• NetFPGA (Summer 2009) Some experiments in adding NetFPGA systems have been done. We plan to integrate NetFPGA systems into the ONL testbed during the summer of 2009.
• NPR Plugins (Ongoing 2009) We continue to add new standard plugins to the NPR and are working on NPR tutorial pages for these plugins. A number of helper functions augment the NPR ONL API functions making it easier to write plugins. Among these family of functions are the following features:
  • Outputting debug messages
  • Creating control message replies
  • A framework for forwarding meta-packets to blocks other than just the Queue Manager
  • A framework for forming plugin chains that pipeline meta-packets to the Queue Manager; e.g., traffic shaper, delay, queue management.
• Session Analysis (Ongoing 2009) The session analysis feature allows students to record their solutions and instructors to view both the solutions and a summary of the solutions. The hope is that we will be able to do some automatic scoring of solutions and provide shorter, improved feedback to students on class assignments.
• XML Experiment Files (Spring 2009) We are moving to an XML format for our experiment files.

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 .
• Network Processor Routers (NPRs) (Summer 2008)
  14 new routers based on Intel's IXP network processors were added to the ONL testbed in early 2008 and used in the spring 2008 Advanced Architecture course taught by Patrick Crowley and the fall 2008 introductory networking course taught by Sergey Gorinsky. The routers are configured using an RLI that is conceptually the same as the one used for the NSP routers.
• New RLI (March 3, 2009):
  • ONL has gone to a single RLI for both router types: NPR (Network Processor Router) and NSP (Network Service Processor). Follow the link in the sidebar of the ONL Web page after logging in. You will need to get a new RLI.jar file.
• New NPR Plugins (March 2009)
  The most recent NPR plugins are from a family of plugins that allow plugins to be chained. For example, you can load plugins onto microengines 2, 3 and 4 which form a chain (or pipeline); i.e., the plugin on ME (microengine) 2 forwards meta-packets to ME 3; the plugin on ME 3 forwards to ME 4; and the plugin on ME 4 forwards to the Queue Manager.
  • shaper++: Shapes traffic using a token bucket.
  • delay++: Delays packets.
  • erd++: Implements Early Random Drop queue management.
  We are working on tutorial pages for these plugins. See the README files in the appropriate subdirectories of onl.arl.wustl.edu:~onl/npr/plugins/ for more details.
• Session Sharing (January 2009) A user can share his/her RLI session with an instructor; i.e., the instructor can see what the user is doing. Furthermore, a chat window allows communication between the user and the instructor.
• General Resource Description Framework (Spring 2008) Our new resource description framework allowed us to add support for the new Network Processor Routers (NPRs) in only two months in early 2008. Since then, we have been working on adding other components (e.g., NetFPGA, virtual switches).