perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Jarett DeAngelis <>]

Hi all,

I have a few questions re: architecture and setup of perfSONAR for a small deployment I'm using for my own educational purposes:

1. iperf3: It seems like installing perfSONAR does not make a machine an iperf3 server, for example, although it does install the package. OWAMP and TWAMP are installed and running by default, on the other hand.
   
   Does this mean that it is implicitly expected that latency/dropped packet tests will be conducted between nodes running perfSONAR, but that iperf3 servers will be stood up and running unrelated to the perfSONAR deployment, separately from perfSONAR nodes, for doing bandwidth testing? This would imply that a common testing configuration could be one node running perfSONAR and many others running nothing other than `iperf3 -s` with no coordination or common configuration with the perfSONAR machine. Is that correct, or am I missing something here?
   
   If that's how a typical architecture is set up, it seems to me that it would make sense to have some kind of system for deploying and maintaining iperf3 on those "target" nodes, maybe with a systemd unit file making sure the server stays up. I haven't really seen any reference to such a thing in the documentation, though, which makes me wonder if I'm misunderstanding how perfSONAR architectures are designed. It's also confusing because OWAMP/TWAMP are intended for measuring latency and packet loss, but obviously you can't do that without more than one perfSONAR node installed... so it also seems like something of a waste or a missed opportunity for perfSONAR nodes not to also be running iperf3 servers for testing, especially if their schedules are coordinated, such that both "ends" of the test are able to report their results into a database.
   
   
2. authn/authz: You are prompted during setup to create local user accounts for logging into the web interface and the shell. I can't tell whether or not directory service support exists in the software such that one can auth to the server (and have role based access control) using LDAP, Active Directory, FreeIPA or similar services.
   
   
3. central management: The scope of what perfsonar-centralmanagement does is not super clear to me -- minimally it sounds like it's related to pSconfig? https://docs.perfsonar.net/psconfig_intro.html Does it automatically configure pSconfig for you? (sounds like no? https://docs.perfsonar.net/psconfig_quickstart.html ) Is there some set of services that centralizes control and reporting for all perfSONAR nodes in a given deployment? Ideally one would stand up a central management server and when installing perfSONAR nodes, simply tell them "use this central management server to receive your marching orders from now on" and proceed from there, but I can't tell whether or not that's what this package is for.

Thanks and apologies for all the newbie questions, I'm just super confused.

Jarett