ndt-users list created

[Phil Reese <>]

I was happy to see the release of the KNOPPIX based NPTools disk!  I've
run with this and the Stanford NDT server is running this in production now.

Using the thumb drive was pretty easy but I wanted to leave things alone
for a good long time, so I was pretty sure I'd exceed the capacity of
virtually any size thumb drive.

Instead I wanted to use the hard drive of the computer.  This turned out
to be easier than I thought it would be.

What I ended up doing was looking closely at knoppix documentation.
Turns out there are a many interesting tools in knoppix.  The one I used
was 'saveconfig'.

Basically, I configured up the basic knoppix server the way I wanted.
Got the time zone set correctly, set the static IP, created a new user
account, enabled sudo for that account, added a pword to the knoppix
user and the new user and edited /etc/init.d/ndt to include a startup of
iperf -s and to insure that /media/hda1 was mounted.

When all was the way I wanted it, I ran the 'saveconfig' script.  This
created two files, knoppix.sh and configs.tbz.

In looking at the provided knoppix.sh file, I could see that the
majority of it was moving .conf files for NPTools disk into the right place.

What I did next was to bunzip2 the configs.tbz file and then tar -tvf on
it to see what files were in it.  I only asked it to copy the Network
areas, so there were a small number of lines.  I then used the original
knoppix.sh file to find the paths to the needed files.  Next I made a
script for the few files, prefaced with 'tar -rpPf configs.tar (files to
add...)' this added the needed files to the configs.tar file.  Then a
simple 'bzip2 configs.tar', then mv configs.tar.bz to configs.tbz.
Finally I added the lines to set the static IP to the end of the
knoppix.sh file.

On the root of the hard drive, usually /media/hda1, I put knoppix.sh and
configs.tbz.  I also created a directory there to hold the fakewww.log
and web100srv.log files.

Time to reboot and see what happens.  At the boot prompt I type:
knoppix nodhcp myconfig=/media/hda1

This started up everything!

One outstanding issue is getting the admin.html file to work right.  It
seems like whatever creates the admin.html file expects that log files
to be in /usr/local/ndt.  I've added links to the /media/hda1/knop/*.log
files, and it started working, though there are a couple of
peculiarities.  First, the graphs seem to dump all the old data into the
RTT bin after a reboot and I've not worked out how to include the links
in the overall set up yet.

I've had this knoppix NDT running for about 5 days and had about 600
tests done.  It failed with the following error:

In the test box, the test would begin and 'Checking for Middleboxes....
 Protocol Error'  would present followed by the usual: 'click START to
re-test', repeated attempts continue to present the 'protocol error'
message.

Hope this helps others who want to easily bring up a NDT server. The
live CD is a lot easier to get operational than doing it from scratch!

Thanks Rich!

Phil Reese
Stanford