perfsonar development work

[Jochen Reinwand <>]

On Friday 09 May 2008 06:24, Jeff W. Boote wrote:
> As to how the hop information can be stored/communicated in the LS
> service registration... I suspect we might know someone who has ideas
> on this. (This is far more complicated than we need for this - but
> some of the general ideas on how this could be done can be found at:
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-ippm-storetraceroutes-08 )

Just a simple, yet important note: It is VERY difficult to do reliable 
traceroutes. It is not completely impossible, but there are a lot more 
problems than you would normally forsee.

Let me give you some of the aspects I faced during setting up traceroute on 
the Hades boxes:

- There are very different traceroutes out there.
- Some traceroute tools change quite often. Some haven't changed over years 
and are even difficult to compile. Even worse, most of the tools change 
between these two states over time...
- It's nearly impossible to find a Swiss army knife traceroute! Features I 
need for Hades and that will therefore be necessary for your ideas as well: 
IPv6 support, highly configurable in a lot of ways (how to send how many 
packets at what time, which protocol to use (UDP,TCP,ICMP), which port to use 
etc.), easy to parse output, possibility to send on a specific NIC, platform 
independent. The good news: I found all of these features looking at 
different traceroute tools. The bad news: There isn't even one of them near 
of supporting all of this features...

Perhaps I should put this information on the wiki for reference...

greetings,
Jochen

-- 
Jochen Reinwand, DFN-Labor
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Regionales RechenZentrum Erlangen (RRZE)
Martensstraße 1, 91058 Erlangen, Germany
Tel. +49 9131 85-28689, -28800, Fax +49 9131 302941

www.win-labor.dfn.de