perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Andrew Lake <>]

On June 4, 2018 at 10:36:38 AM, Chevalier, Scott S () wrote:

Greetings Stack, 

Probably could've reinforced this a couple more times during the workshop, but you came to the correct conclusion already - these little Brix boxes are under-resourced to support the full toolkit build. __ For purposes of the training last week it was decided to go full toolkit for familiarity of the resources there and ease of install. 

Spoke with Andy (@ESnet) this morning and he's likely to get back to you this week regarding your meshconfig error. He'll probably also have more detail-oriented queries for you regarding the OS build and the firewall. 

Ps - top-notch issue-tracking and details. Thanks! 

Cheers, 

Scott Chevalier 
Network Systems Analyst 
International Networks @ IU <http://in.iu.edu/> 
812-856-9964 


On 6/2/18, 5:36 PM, " on behalf of " < on behalf of > wrote: 

Greetings, 

Yesterday (2018.06.01) I attended the [1] Great Plains Network - FIONA Node Workshop to learn how to build perfSONAR nodes. As part of the workshop, we did our testing on these [2] tiny GIGABYTE EL-20-3700-32GB devices. 

[1] https://conferences.k-state.edu/gpn/schedule-2/workshops/ <https://conferences.k-state.edu/gpn/schedule-2/workshops/> 
[2] https://github.com/GreatPlainsNetwork/20180601-FIONAworkshop/tree/master/hardware/fionette <https://github.com/GreatPlainsNetwork/20180601-FIONAworkshop/tree/master/hardware/fionette> 

I hacked away many hours last night rebuilding, experimenting, and breaking it repeatedly with perfSONAR. I've been hackin away at it many hours today too. I've come to the conclusion that I just simply can't run a full toolkit on this poor little thing. It just cranks away on all four cores and I end up pushing 60C on the temp (passively cooled) and then I get all kinds of fun errors. :-) 

So, I did another rebuild. Rocking the latest version of Scientific Linux 7.5 and then I did an install of the following: 
perfsonar-toolkit-security 
perfsonar-testpoint 
perfsonar-toolkit-systemenv-testpoint 
perfsonar-toolkit-sysctl 
perfsonar-toolkit-servicewatcher 
perfsonar-toolkit-ntp (Still curious as to why ntp over default of chrony but whatever :-) 
Now I can run a bunch of the tests and whatnot via command line and things are running SO MUCH better. I tossed this device out into my DMZ, poked a few holes in my firewall to route the traffic listed in the docs to this node, and successfully tested throughput to several hosts I found in the lookup service. Temp is low and I'm not pegging all the cores when I do tests! Awesome! 

But I want to see the pretty graphs too... 

No worries, I thought. I will just set up a Central Measurement Archive (got the idea from the pictures here [3]). Built up a vm in my private environment with a bunch of memory and loads of cores running Scientific Linux 7.5. Ran through the install [4] page again selecting just the perfsonar-centralmanagement package to install then followed the link directions to go to the configuration page [5]. Err....what? OK. I get the general idea of the mesh...but I don't see how that is relevant in the slightest. I am looking to pull the results of the tests I created via cli from the node for the pretty graph. I've only got one node and I'm not really ready to expand my needs to a mesh yet. Ah. Here we go [6] Deploying a Central Measurement Archive. I already installed, scroll down, this is a simple setup at my house skip down to "Authenticating by IP Address", then commands to run. Bingo! 

[3] https://docs.perfsonar.net/install_options.html <https://docs.perfsonar.net/install_options.html> 
[4] https://docs.perfsonar.net/install_centos.html <https://docs.perfsonar.net/install_centos.html> 
[5] https://docs.perfsonar.net/multi_overview.html <https://docs.perfsonar.net/multi_overview.html>[6] http://docs.perfsonar.net/multi_ma_install.html <http://docs.perfsonar.net/multi_ma_install.html> 

(root) $ cd /usr/lib/esmond 
(root) $ . bin/activate 
(esmond) (root) $ python esmond/manage.py add_user_ip_address <My user on the node> <IP of the node> 
Traceback (most recent call last): File "esmond/manage.py", line 6, in <module> 
import settings # Assumed to be in the same directory. 
File "/usr/lib/esmond/esmond/settings.py", line 16, in <module> 
raise Error("ESMOND_ROOT not defined in environment") 
NameError: name 'Error' is not defined 


Err. Uh oh. 
I've been poking away for 45 minutes trying to get passed this point. 

1. Any idea what I'm doing wrong? 

Did you log out after running the “yum install perfsonar-centralmanagement” and then log back-in before you ran the commands for adding the user? It is complaining that the environment variable ESMOND_ROOT is not set which gets set by a script in /etc/profile.d at login. 

2. Am I just doing the wrong thing here for wanting to just view the node tests? 

If you just have one node and it’s not a toolkit, there is nothing technically wrong with the path you are taking. Generally if you saw just one box as your long-term deployment size and you want to be able to store results, I’d maybe recommend merging the central server and the testpoint into one box capable of being a toolkit since it would simplify things. If you plan on adding more nodes though, the setup you have is a great way to get things started to familiarize yourself with the tools. As far as you mesh file goes, just make sure all the hosts that are NOT your measurement host have “no_agent” set. That indicates that the host in question is not looking at the mesh, so its counting on your measurement node to setup the test. 

3. The way my network traffic flows is that the CMA host can initiate traffic to the DMZ host, but not the other way. Do I need to poke holes in my firewall to allow the DMZ node to communicate back to the VM or can it just be a "pull only" scenario? 

If you want results for traffic from the DMZ to the CMA then it is probably easiest to poke holes if you can. In particular OWAMP data packets are UDP from source to dest so no tricks you can do with who initiates the TCP handshake to get that working. I assume its just a firewall, not a firewall+NAT? If there is a NAT things get more difficult. 

Thanks! 
~Stack~