SoX Network Performance Workshop: Requirements

Agenda -- Participants-- Requirements -- Lodging -- Presentations -- Summary -- Workshop Locations

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21-22 March 2005
Georgia Institute for Technology
Atlanta, Georgia


To ensure the best possible use of time at the workshop, Internet2 recommends that the following technical capabilities be met by both the participant and the host. The host prerequisites are required for the workshop to take place. Participants are not required to but are encouraged to meet all prerequisites so that they may fully participate in, and benefit from, all workshop activities.

Goal:

Participants will attempt to configure measurement hosts on their own network from the workshop. These hosts will be configured to run the beacon tools. (NDT, owamp, bwctl)

Participant Requirements:

1.) Participants should have their own laptop at the workshop with sufficient access to their home site to remotely install and configure measurement hosts on their own network.

2.) Participants should have identified at least one measurement point (preferably two) on their own network. Each measurement point may require multiple hosts to run the current measurement tools.

Latency measurement can not co-exist with throughput measurements. And different throughput tools can interfere with each other on the same host. We intend to create a meta-scheduler for this purpose but until we do, the easiest solution is to run multiple hosts. This means each measurement point will ideally have 3 hosts currently to run each of the current tools.

3.) For each measurement point, participants should determine which tools they would like to install. We recommend installing all of the tools at every measurement point even if you need to install them on the same host and only make one of them active at a time for now.

4.) All of the tools are dependent upon the hosts having good time. Therefore, NTP is a requirement for all hosts. In particular this means:

        a) Each host should have full access to the internet for NTP (port UDP 123 must be open for sending and receiving). Information on how to configure NTP in a sufficient way for the measurement tools will be one of the topics of the workshop.

        b) It would be useful for each participant to find several (at least 4 or 5) stratum-1 NTP servers "close" to the measurement points. Ideally these servers will be reached by diverse network paths.

5.) Host requirements:

Described here is the hardware platform for the general case. Different arrangements are required for those who want to use a hardware clock with owamp.

General Host Requirements:

        Hardware:

• CPU (min processor speed/min cache/min bus speed)
• Memory 512MB min
• Disk XX GB min/ speed min
• NIC (For throughput tests, as fast as you want to test. For owamp FastEthernet is best)

        OS:

• Linux (latest kernel version with web100)

        Software:

• C development environment (compiler/libraries/make etc.)
• web100 libraries/tools
• libpcap library

Note: NDT web100srv process needs root access

OWAMP host requirements for a local hardware clock:

(These differences are only needed if an actual hardware clock will be connected to the host for better accuracy. This case will not be covered at the workshop unless there are specific requests for it, and extra time is alloted for it. This is a non-trivial exercise.)

Hardware:

• Above should be fine

• FreeBSD 5.3 (NTP PPS kernel turned on in kernel config)

• C development environment (compiler/libraries/make etc.)

NTP:

• UDP 123

OWAMP:

• UDP * (all ephemeral outgoing)
• UDP * (all ephemeral incoming - administrator selectable for upcoming version)
• TCP 4822 (4824 for the upcoming version)

BWCTL:

• UDP 5001-5010 (iperf ports - admin configurable, but these are recommended for matching with other sites)
• TCP 5001-5010 (iperf ports - admin configurable, but these are recommended for matching with other sites)
• (The "receiver" gets to define the port number, so another reasonable solution is to allow anything outgoing and only a specific set incoming.)
• TCP 4823
• TCP (* outgoing for peer communication between bwctld's)
• TCP (XX incoming - admin configurable, incoming for peer communication between bwctld's. On Abilene we just use ephemeral, we could suggest something I suppose...)

NDT:

• TCP 7123        (fakewww server default - or real web server)
• TCP 3001-3003 (web100srv ports - testing and analysis engine)