wanted: 'beacon' hosts ?

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

I don't really know what to ask for or who, so redirection is welcome.

I am setting up some monitoring from within our AS to a handful of sites
scattered around the UK and the rest of the world. Now, I get annoyed when
someone reads the same file off my web server evey five minutes, so I am not
going to do it to anyone else without permission.

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 ?

I *DO NOT* want to get involved in buying this data from anyone please. I am
very happy to provide this service in return, or even just for the sake of
it without anything back. What I evisage is the 5-miutely 'GET'ing of a
20k-ish text file from a web server and a group of 5 ICMP Echos at about the
same intervals...

PS I know this is NANOG, but I am even more interested in hearing from UK
and European networks.

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

2

Peter Galbavy wrote:

I don't really know what to ask for or who, so redirection is welcome.

I am setting up some monitoring from within our AS to a handful of sites
scattered around the UK and the rest of the world. Now, I get annoyed when
someone reads the same file off my web server evey five minutes, so I am not
going to do it to anyone else without permission.

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 ?

I *DO NOT* want to get involved in buying this data from anyone please. I am
very happy to provide this service in return, or even just for the sake of
it without anything back. What I evisage is the 5-miutely 'GET'ing of a
20k-ish text file from a web server and a group of 5 ICMP Echos at about the
same intervals...

PS I know this is NANOG, but I am even more interested in hearing from UK
and European networks.

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.

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

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

3

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)

This is a very good idea. If you want to use www.gitoyen.net, ask me in
private.

PS I know this is NANOG, but I am even more interested in hearing from UK
and European networks.

Unfortunately, there is no such list for Europe :frowning: The closest is
lir-wg@ripe.net which talks more about bureaucratic issues and less about
technical ones.

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.

A Web site to exchange easily beacon hosts would be a great idea. That's why I
reply in public.

4

Unfortunately, there is no such list for Europe :frowning: The closest is
lir-wg@ripe.net which talks more about bureaucratic issues and less about
technical ones.

Would eof-list@ripe.net fit the bill?

Charter:
  The European Operators Forum deals with the operational
  issues of networks in Europe, such as new backbones and
  Internet Exchange Points.

Rob

5

> 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 :
NLANR -- National Laboratory for Applied Network Research

  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

6

a message of 12 lines which said:

> Unfortunately, there is no such list for Europe :frowning: The closest is
> lir-wg@ripe.net which talks more about bureaucratic issues and less about
> technical ones.

Would eof-list@ripe.net fit the bill?

I'm a member of that list. Traffic is almost nil. Also, it depends on
RIPE which is not good if you want to bash RIPE.

7

I'm a member of that list. Traffic is almost nil.

All the more reason for injecting some life into it. :slight_smile:

Also, it depends on RIPE which is not good if you want to bash RIPE.

Why? Is it moderated? If you have a reason for RIPE-bashing, I'd
have thought RIPE lists would be the perfect place to air your
views so "they" might listen.

Might be best to take followups off NANOG, as this is starting to
stray.

Rob

8

Would you like to elaborate on that last part, please?

BTW, feel free, within measure, to use www.ripe.net as a beacon host. Location is Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Joao Damas
RIPE NCC

9

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.

I have had many positive replies both public and private. I will summarise
to the list in the next day or two and thanks for all the kind offers.

Peter

10

[catching up on old nanog mails]

there is a distributed project out there somewhere for doing just this.
(Multiple sites, distribution of URLs to be monitored, etc.)

<URL:http://webperf.org/> is it, I think.

James.