perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Ryan Harden <>]

Hello,

I’m digging up an old topic here, (yes I’ve read the archives) but I’m 
curious what the current state of affairs is. The most recent conversations I 
can find date back to 2014.

I’m working on building a low-cost perfSonar mesh to measure loss and latency 
(throughput isn’t a requirement) across our campus. My goal is to build 
something that can be deployed quickly and easily in either a permanent or 
temporary fashion. Predictably, the RPi3 looks very attractive for this, so 
I’ve acquired four to experiment with. I’m not looking for ns latency 
resolution, just obvious spikes in latency that something like an RPi can 
detect in a reliable way.

My goals are:
1) Power via PoE (done with adapter)
2) Run basic perfSonar packages (perhaps rebuilt for ARM?)
3) Gather wireless connection/auth statistics.
4) Run with zero local disk (PXE boot? NFS?) (Cycle PoE port triggers 
software upgrade, etc)
5) Run periodic latency/loss tests. (think 30 second 1Mbps UDP tests, nothing 
crazy)

Has anyone already worked on this? Any notes specifically for the RPi3? It’s 
significantly faster and has some upgraded hardware over the original/RPi2 
versions.
Given the relatively low investment so far, I could reset and go for a small 
x86 device, but I’d prefer to stick with the RP if I can.

Thanks

/Ryan

Ryan Harden
Research and Advanced Networking Architect
University of Chicago - ASN160
P: 773.834.5441