perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Hunter Fuller <>]

I just searched to see if anyone had done this, and it looks like you're the only one to have mentioned it recently that I can find. Did you ever go diskless?

I am going to stick with server hardware, but I was hoping to make it diskless as I will be turning up some two-digit number of PerfSonar nodes. We are following Red Hat's documentation about PXE booting RHEL 7, and then we will be trying to set up the nodes to not require any local storage at all. This will be especially interesting given the new architecture of PerfSonar 4 with regards to scheduling and such.

On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 3:14 PM Ryan Harden <> wrote:

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