[Planetlab-announce] v3 rollout

[Larry Peterson]

PlanetLab Community:

We are starting to upgrade nodes with Version 3.0 of PlanetLab's
core software. The rollout will be slow at first (involving just
a few nodes and giving everyone a chance to port their code to
v3), but we expect to accelerate the process during the week of
November 15th, with the goal of having all nodes upgraded by the
end of that week. Unexpected problems could delay the rollout,
but users should plan for that schedule.

Version 3.0 will not be dramatically different from Version 2.0
from the perspective of services running in a slice, but there
are some differences, the most notable involves network
virtualization, particularly safe raw sockets. See

    http://www.planet-lab.org/PDN/PDN-04-023/

for an overview of v3, which includes pointers to the relevant
programming interfaces. Also, see

    http://planet-lab.org/php/v3nodes.php

to learn what nodes are running v3 at any point in time.

During the next few weeks, users should take the following actions:

   o Join the users at lists.planet-lab.org mailing list; further
     announcements about the progress of the rollout will be
     posted there.

   o Test your service on a v3 node and report your experiences
     to the users mailing list; detailed bug reports can also
     be sent to support at planet-lab.org. (Feedback on security
     vulnerabilities is especially welcome.)

   o If there is a critical behavior that's important to your
     service, write a Q/A test that we can include in our
     regression tests. Send such tests to support at planet-lab.org.

   o Make sure your local PlanetLab nodes meet the minimum hardware
     requirements (http://www.planet-lab.org/consortium/hardware.php).
     We will not be upgrading sub-standard nodes to v3, which will
     ultimately impact your site's slice allocation.

Larry