perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Brian Candler <>]

On 30/11/2015 12:14, Antoine Delvaux wrote:
> Hi Brian,
>
> I’m not sure about exact changes to the JSON parsing that could make your 
> test fail, but I know we have a newer bwctl package available for 
> Debian/Ubuntu that you could try out.  1.5.2 is getting a bit old and the 
> error you see could be an incompatibility between the current regular_testing 
> daemon parsing code and this older bwctl version.
I'll look into this. However I think the problem was down to firewall 
rules: I found I had enabled the old TCP port range (6001-6200) instead 
of the new one (5001-5900). It would be good if more prominence could be 
given to the new range in
http://www.perfsonar.net/deploy/security-considerations/#Using_perfSONAR_with_Firewalls

I think the JSON error is actually saying "I can't parse an empty JSON 
string". I think the error message could be made more helpful in that case.

There is already a flag "$in_json" in 
/opt/perfsonar_ps/regular_testing/lib/perfSONAR_PS/RegularTesting/Parsers/Iperf3.pm, 
so if $in_json is not set then don't attempt to parse the JSON, but 
return a message which contains $stdout instead?

> You can try to use the apt repository you find at 
> http://downloads.perfsonar.net/debian/perfsonar-wheezy-3.5.list to install a 
> newer version of bwctl (1.5.6) and see what’s the behaviour.  The packages 
> coming from this repo are working with Debian Wheezy, Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 
> 14.04.  You seem to run Ubuntu 14.10 which we don’t explicitly support, but 
> you might want to give the bwctl package a try.
Actually it's 12.04 I'm using:

# cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=12.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=precise
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS"

> Other than that, did you try to increase the regular_testing daemon logging 
> to DEBUG in regular_testing-logger.conf ?
I hadn't - have done so now and will see if that turns up anything 
interesting.

Regards,

Brian.