[AG-TECH] Announcing a secure network test framework . . . .

[Deb Agarwal]

Thought you might be interested in the tool we just released.

This message is to announce the alpha release of Nettest, a secure,
real-time network monitoring framework developed in the Distributed
Systems Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

The Nettest framework is designed to incorporate existing and new
network tests, and be run as a daemon or an interactive process.
Requests for network tests are received via a SSL connection or 
the user interface and are authorized using an ACL list (in the 
future authorization using Akenti will also be supported).

For tests that require coordination between the two ends of the test,
Nettest establishes a SSL connection to accomplish this coordination.
A test between two remote computers can be requested via the user
interface if the Nettest daemon is running on both remote machines 
and the user is authorized.  Authorization for the test is through a 
chain of trust established by the Nettest daemons.  Nettest is 
responsible for determining if the test request is authorized, but it 
does nothing further to secure the test once the test is running.

Currently the Nettest framework incorporates Iperf-v1.2, a simple 
ping type test, and a tuned TCP test that uses a given required 
throughput and ping results to determine the round trip time to set 
a buffer size (based on the delay bandwidth product) and then performs 
an Iperf  TCP throughput test. Additional network test tools can be 
integrated into the Nettest framework in the future.


Nettest was tested and developed on Linux and Solaris.  Nettest is
written in C++, primarily using gcc but also tested on SparcWorks C++.  
Secure communication is implemented using SSL-v0.9.6.

To run Nettest you will need the latest version of Openssl.

    http://www.openssl.org/source/


NetLogger can be used for result reporting purposes, it will allow you
to send all test results to one location.

    http://www-didc.lbl.gov/NetLogger/


More information on Nettest and downloadable source code can be found
at:

    http://www-itg.lbl.gov/nettest


The Iperf network testing tool can be found at:

  http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/

  The Iperf tool was developed by the distributed applications support 
  team of the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR).
  comments specific to Iperf, mail to dast at nlanr.net


Please email Nettest questions or comments to:
Deborah A. Agarwal      DAAgarwal at lbl.gov and 
Joshua R. Boverhof      JRBoverhof at lbl.gov

CREDITS: Our core program is supported by the Office of Energy Research, Office 
of Computation and Technology Research , Mathematical, Information, and 
Computational Sciences Division, of the U. S. Department of Energy under 
contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00098 with the University of California.
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