perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Aaron Brown <>]

Hey Andy, Roderick, Pol,

A couple comments/answers inline

Cheers,
Aaron

On Jul 25, 2014, at 8:43 AM, Andrew Lake 
<>
 wrote:

> Hi Roderick, Pol,
> 
> Lots of questions in these threads, so sorry if I miss any but I'll try to 
> hit every thing below:
> 
> - The error "bwping question - Unable to open control connection" means 
> that the other side does not have bwctld running. A lot of owamp hosts 
> explicitly turn bwctld off since they are dedicated to only owamp 
> measurements. The addition of bwctl being able to run the owping command is 
> relatively recent so this is especially true. I believe this is the case 
> with your owamp.seat.net.internet2.edu example. 

There’s a “—no-endpoint” or “-E” flag that can be used to say that the remote 
side doesn’t have bwctl running on it. It will try to connect to bwctl on the 
host, but if it can’t connect, it’ll try to run a test to the owamp daemon 
running on the host.

> - The "bwctl: local tool exited before expected with status=1" error to the 
> XSEDE host I am less sure about. Firewall maybe? Aaron Brown might have a 
> better idea, but he is out of the office for the day. 

Yeah, that looks to be a firewall issue. You could try specifying the “-x” 
flag, and see if something is going wrong on the server side. Otherwise, 
that’s a pretty standard firewall error message.

> - Try "bwping -T owamp -c chic-pt1.es.net". I believe all the esnet  boxes 
> with -pt1 in the name have both bwctl and owamp. If you go to 
> http://stats.es.net/ServicesDirectory/ and type "es.net" in the search box 
> you should get a full listing under the BWCTL heading.
> 
> - As for Pol's question about whether bwctl and owamp communicating their 
> schedules to each other, the answer has changed from a simple "no" of a few 
> months ago to "it depends". In the case of on-demand bwping commands from 
> the command line, bwctld does coordinate the schedule for both the owamp 
> test and throughput tests. The owamp test run in this case usually sends 
> 100 packets or so over the course of a few seconds (depending on the 
> parameters you give it). In other words, it runs for a finite amount of 
> time. When you set-up a regular test via the Toolkit GUI or the mesh config 
> though, it starts a type of owamp test that is always running. In this case 
> owamp is running 100% of the time which means when bwctl runs it has the 
> potential to interfere with the owamp results. It is desirable to run owamp 
> like this because it allows you to catch loss events, short-lived path 
> changes and other things you could easily miss just doing one-off tests. 
> Other approaches do exist each with its strength's and weaknesses but this 
> is the approach the toolkit has taken. As such, having two boxes is the 
> lowest risk method of ensuring your results are not tainted currently. 
> 
> - A few things worth mentioning that are in the pipeline for 3.4 (a release 
> candidate of which just came out). First, bwctl will be registering what 
> tools it supports in the lookup service, so issues like trying to figure 
> out where you can run bwping become easier to answer. Also, ESnet, IU NOC 
> and others are in the middle of testing a dual-interfaced host that runs 
> bwctl and owamp on separate interfaces. We are still investigating what 
> ramifications this has on the results. There is a script which is in the 
> middle of being documented that helps configure the routing for this type 
> of setup on 3.4. Finally, the 3.4 graphs will be capable of displaying 
> bwctl and owamp results on the same graph which should make it somewhat 
> easier to see conflicts that arise from running both on the same host
> 
> Let me know if I missed something and hopefully that answers the questions.
> 
> Thanks,
> Andy
> 
> On Jul 25, 2014, at 2:51 AM, "Roderick Mooi" 
> <>
>  wrote:
> 
>> Hi Pol
>> 
>> I had a similar problem recently. Look for this thread in the mailing 
>> list: "bwping question - Unable to open control connection". It may help.
>> 
>> I haven't gotten to testing the new version of bwctl Aaron proposed but if 
>> you do please let us know how it works.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> 
>> Roderick
>> 
>>>>> On 2014-07-24 at 21:55, Pol Llovet 
>>>>> <>
>>>>>  wrote:
>>> Hello!
>>> 
>>> I recently attended the PS tutorial at XSEDE and we have been charging
>>> ahead with it here at MSU.  We now have 2 servers (soon to be 3) that are
>>> testing bandwidth from the edge, behind the firewall, and deep in the
>>> network.  We don't have any owamp nodes yet, but this leads me to my
>>> question:
>>> 
>>> The reason that we would need those owamp nodes is because we were told
>>> that the scheduler for owamp tests and bwctl tests don't communicate so 
>>> you
>>> run the risk of the tests happening on top of one another and getting bad
>>> data. However, it seems like there are terminal versions of the tests that
>>> can be run safely (bwping, bwtraceroute).  Am I correct in that 
>>> assumption?
>>> 
>>> I have tried running bwping with -T owamp, but I have been unable to have 
>>> a
>>> successful test.  For example:
>>> 
>>> [root@status
>>>  pol]# bwping -T owamp -c owamp.seat.net.internet2.edu
>>> bwping: Unable to connect to owamp.seat.net.internet2.edu
>>> 
>>> This test does seem to get scheduled if I use ps.tacc.xsede.org as the
>>> target, but I get the following result:
>>> 
>>> SENDER START
>>> owping: FILE=owping.c, LINE=1603, Unable to open control connection to
>>> [129.114.0.189]:5774.
>>> bwctl: local tool exited before expected with status=1
>>> 
>>> When I go to http://ps.tacc.xsede.org/toolkit/ it looks like owamp is on
>>> port 861, but that errors out entirely when I try to use the same command
>>> with ps.tacc.xsede.org:861.
>>> 
>>> So, can we use bwping with owamp? Or is this just a placeholder for later
>>> functionality?
>>> 
>>> thanks in advance,
>>> 
>>> pol
>>> 
>>> Pol M. Llovet
>>> Research Computing / Middleware
>>> Montana State University
>>> w: 406-994-3416
>>> c: 406-646-6747
>>> 
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>> 
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>