[Planetlab-devel] myplc node software on embedded firewall router

[Marc E. Fiuczynski]

Hello,

Tom Anderson's WORLDS paper suggested that PlanetLab should be less
enterprise centric.  There is nothing inherent in our software that dictates
the requirement of powerful servers.  I've made some minor modifications to
get our software operational on a little firewall router box called the
Soekris net4801 (http://www.soekris.com/net4801.htm).  This box has a 266Mhz
AMD Geode processor, 128MB RAM, and three fast ethernet ports.  My specific
configuration uses a 256MB compact flash card as the "pl bootcd" device and
a 40GB harddrive to host the PlanetLab software / slices etc.  While a
harddrive is currently needed, one certainly could get away with a fairly
small one.

The Soekris has a USB 1.1 port and a PCI slot. I am attaching my 3G 1xrtt
cell phone to the USB port and added a SMC-based 54g WiFi PCI card to the
system, as I would like to use it as an Access Point / mesh node in the
future.  Technically there are better / cheaper firewall boxes on the
market, but those require porting all software to a non-x86 processor.
While I think there is nothing that inherently ties our software to x86, I
am not going to invest time in that direction for now.

Let me know if you want to replicate this setup.

Best regards,
Marc