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

[Tom Anderson]

let me put a plug in for the emulab interface to planetlab.  Without admission control, small boxes can get knocked over by workload demand.  Emulab has a nice setup for preventing overload of planetlab nodes, which could be part of a solution in this space.

________________________________

From: devel-bounces at planet-lab.org on behalf of Marc E. Fiuczynski
Sent: Wed 11/22/2006 1:37 PM
To: devel at lists.planet-lab.org
Subject: [Planetlab-devel] myplc node software on embedded firewall router



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

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