perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Alan Whinery <>]

One nit, after spending some time messing about with bwctl 1.5.1 --

The existence of a "-n (number of tests)" arg in bwtraceroute
effectively masks "-n (don't do name resolution)" in tracepath and
traceroute. With many (most?) paths including a hop with some proportion
of hops with no associated reverse DNS record, doing name resolutions
can increase the trace* time-to-complete by several orders of magnitude,
so it's good to be able to send traceroute/tracepath a "-n".  This
creates issues when the extra time stacks up across multiple traces, and
if you really want names at some point you could resolve them from the
collected IP addresses.

I suggest adding a bwctl switch which tells the tool in question to
not-resolve, not necessarily "-n" itself, like "--no-dns" .

On 2/18/2014 8:11 AM, Aaron Brown wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> A new version of BWCTL is now available. BWCTL 1.5.1 is a major upgrade 
> over the previously released version.
>
> Notable additions in this release:
> - Support for ping and owping (Run 'bwping -h' to see the available options)
> - Support for traceroute and tracepath (Run 'bwtraceroute -h' to see the 
> available options)
> - Support for iperf3, and improved support for nuttcp
> - Support for working behind a firewall for iperf3, ping, traceroute and 
> tracepath (use the "--flip" flag when the receiver is behind the firewall)
> - Handles NTP unsync a bit better (the daemon start, but will deny tests 
> until NTP is synchronized)
>
> Those who are using the perfSONAR Toolkit, or otherwise have the Internet2 
> RPM repository enabled, can run 'yum update' to get the latest changes. For 
> those who are installing from source or prefer to install the RPMs 
> manually, the newest version can be downloaded from 
> http://software.internet2.edu/ . After installation, you will need to 
> restart bwctld to use the new features. You can do this by running 
> “/etc/init.d/bwctld restart”.
>
> Please let us know if you have any questions and we look forward to 
> everyone's continued feedback and support!
>
> Thank you,
> The perfSONAR-PS Development Team