MPR 2006 01

From GEANT2-JRA1 Wiki

January 2006

A GÉANT2 all activity meeting has been held in Cambridge. During that meeting several JRA1 sessions were held:

• “perfSONAR development week” where the work on the design of a distributed lookup service has started. A special attention was given to define the different type of documentation needed for the project as it is drawing more and more attention. It has been decided to provide an overview documentation about each service, a specification documentation explaining how to inter-act with the services this targets mostly the visualisation developers), a developer’s guide for the new developers joining the work and an user guide targeting the installation and the configuration of the services. Test and release management were discussed as they are foreseen as getting more and more important.
• A “JRA1-JRA3” enabled to get a better understanding about the work and knowledge of both activities (L1-L2 technology description and monitoring, perfSONAR architecture, perfSONAR schema, metric concatenation and aggregation) and enabled to identify missing pieces of information and work to pursue the work on L2 circuit monitoring.
• A “JRA1-JRA5” meeting was held to pursue the work on the use of the JRA5 AA Infrastructure by JRA1. This allowed to refine how can perfSONAR use eduGAIN infrastructure and primitives and the role of the Lookup Service within the perfSONAR AuthN flow.
• The JRA1 work has been presented during the GEANT2 technical workshop plenary.
• General information about how to use perfSONAR and how to install it has been provided during a dedicated session “JRA1 meets the NRENs”. This experience has been very valuable in terms of feedback received.
• Internal JRA1 meeting was held, including parallel sessions.

Two additional Measurement Archives instances have been deployed by Carnet and Cesnet to provide link capacity and utilisation. A total of nine Measurement Archives have been deployed, amongst them, six by European NRENs (http://monstera.man.poznan.pl/jra1-wiki/index.php/RRD_type_MA_Service_Installations). The write capability has been added to the java RRD MA. This allows a Measurement Point to send data and write into a Measurement Archive. This functionality will be helpful when on-demand tests over a long period of time will be requested.

In addition to the link utilisation MA mentioned in the previous paragraph, a One Way Delay MA has been made available. It provides access to OWD, IPDV, OWPL information provided by the twelve IPPM measurement points deployed by JRA1 and SA3.

Work on Topology Service has been started.

A second version of the visualisation tool perfsonarUI has been provided. It contains the capability of supporting older version of the schema and a traceroute parsing capability http://monstera.man.poznan.pl/jra1-wiki/index.php/PerfsonarUI

"Best practice" recommendations for metric representation in visualisation tools were finalised.

The Metric Concatenation Framework (DJ1.2.3) has been finalised after having been reviewed internally by the GÉANT2 project.

A SSH/Telnet MP has been design. Its goal is to provide access to a limited set of CLI commands onto network equipments. Typically it will provide the same commands as the one provided by looking glass tools. The ultimate goal is to provide a looking glass able to get access to information from multiple domains by accessing SSH/telnet MPs spread into several domains.

A Layer2 measurement point is currently being worked on. The goal of this measurement point is to retrieve data from an NMS and to write this data into a Measurement Archive, which can thus be accessed through the perfSONAR schema. This work has been started much more early than planned as the need to provide L2 information is growing. The first lightpath are planned for Q2-Q3 2006. It has to be noted that this is the first step in the direction of monitoring a lightpath and that the road is still long before having a first full path monitored as all the networks involved would need to provide such information.