perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Cort Buffington <>]

Folks,

I’m trying hard to let Casey be the “interface” for KanREN’s efforts here — 
but on this topic, it’s probably easiest if I throw in directly.

I have a BeagleBone Black that I’ve been hoping to use. I’ve been slowly 
working on a cross-compilation environment to try and build a kernel with the 
right patches. Do the tests we’re talking about doing with these boxes need 
that? If not, I’ll skip over that part and star installing the software you 
have worked on.

We’d targeted the Cubox due to more “power”, but the BeagleBone black is less 
expensive, more readily available, and has a “real” Ethernet interface rather 
than the USB-Ethernet of the Raspberry Pi… and I have a BBB, so it seemed 
like a good place to work in advance of Casey getting our Cubox-i4-Pros.

On May 1, 2014, at 12:39 PM, Brian Tierney 
<>
 wrote:

> On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 10:24 AM, Casey Russell 
> <>
>  wrote:
>> Thank you Brian, for all your time in this early testing.
>> 
>> I'm still waiting for my Cubox-i4-Pro to arrive.  KanREN will be working to
>> test-pilot these devices as soon as we can get our hands on one.
>> 
>> I'm growing a bit concerned about Solid-Run's ability to supply a decent
>> number of these things.  I hope they can ramp up production soon, because
>> these little guys appear to beat the pants off of most other devices in the
>> class.
> 
> This is a valid concern. Our order took about 3 months to arrive.
> 
> Has anyone tried using one of these:
> http://beagleboard.org/Products/BeagleBone
> 
> I think the same fedora image is supposed to work with that too.
> 
> 
>> 
>> On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 11:40 AM, Brian Tierney 
>> <>
>>  wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi Folks:
>>> 
>>> I've made some progress on getting perfSONAR running on my $120
>>> cubox-i4Pro.
>>> 
>>> Attempt #1 was to use their debian kernel and install everything from
>>> source. That worked fine, but since perfSONAR is RPM-based, I wanted
>>> to see if I could find an OS for it that supported RPMs.
>>> 
>>> Then I found a Fedora kernel here:
>>> http://cubox-i.cf/files/fedora20-kernel3.14rc4-cubox-i-20140310.img.zip
>>> 
>>> Which works great, except it does not seem to work with an HDMI
>>> monitor, so you have to put it on a subnet with DHCP and ssh in to
>>> change the default root password of 'fedora'.
>>> 
>>> I built some RPMs for bwctl and owamp and temporarily put them here if
>>> anyone has one of these devices and wants to play with perfSONAR on
>>> it:
>>>  http://antg-dev.es.net/rpms/arm/
>>> 
>>> After these are tested more we can move these to the main Internet2 RPM
>>> repo.
>>> And 'yum install nuttcp iperf3 iperf' just works, as all are in the
>>> main fedora arm repo. Cool!
>>> 
>>> So far everything is working well.  NTP drift is around 1ms, which is
>>> usable, and TCP flows max out at 350Mbps, which is good enough for
>>> many use cases. But I'd recommend mainly using these devices for
>>> packet loss testing, not throughput testing.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Brian Tierney, http://www.es.net/tierney
>>> 
>>> Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), Berkeley National Lab
>>> 
>>> http://fasterdata.es.net
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Brian Tierney, http://www.es.net/tierney
> 
> Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), Berkeley National Lab
> 
> http://fasterdata.es.net

--
Cortney T. Buffington
Executive Director
KanREN, Inc.

Office: (785) 856-9800
Mobile: (785) 865-7206