[Click] click Digest, Vol 81, Issue 5

[John Russell Lane]

Hi Holly,

We've been using Click for a while on PlanetLab ...

As you likely already know, PlanetLab (and Vini) run within VServers,
which mean you have to do a little more work than usual to get packets
into the Click router.  FromDevice/ToDevice/RawSocket* and anything
that relies on root privileges are known *not* to work on PlanetLab
and you're generally limited to a bound Socket listening and sending
on a given port (though I heard once that it was possible to get the
tap device working, I've not tried).

Though I think the base installation is a somewhat old Fedora Core 8,
getting Click built on PL isn't particularly difficult and there is
(IIRC) a click.spec file for it running around somewhere (in the Click
distribution? ...).  The average PL box is highly loaded, though, so
if you have access to a local Core 8 install or an environment like
Emulab, it's much faster to build your things there (e.g., Emulab's
FEDORA8-STD image seems to work well for our work).

There may be a few other annoyances/gotchas depending upon what you're
looking to do; the PL users list might also be a good place to search
for answers / ask questions.

jrl.

* Note: IIRC, there used to be support for RawSocket (the element) on
PlanetLab such that it would open a socket for you and allow you to
use it with the same semantics as on a normal machine (though you
could only send receive on one port), provided that the IP/port
information were not spoofed.  This may even be documented still
somewhere, but to the best of my knowledge the feature was dropped in
the latest PL upgrade a year or more ago.

> Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:52:12 +0100
> From: Roberto Riggio <roberto.riggio at create-net.org>
> Subject: Re: [Click] Click on Planet Lab
> To: click at pdos.csail.mit.edu
> Message-ID: <4B8E233C.1010507 at create-net.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Hi,
>
> we are actually using click to run our multiradio mesh network
> on planetlab+vini. Vini is useful in our case because it allows to have
> performance isolation at the network level between the various slices.
>
> At the moment we are using some very simple topologies (string, circle).
> The very interesting thing is that we can run the same code on planetlab
> and on the actual wireless routers.
>
> We plan to put some online resources on the project website as soon as
> we can cleanup scripts and codes (www.wing-project.org).
>
> R.
>
> On 03/02/2010 08:00 PM, Holly Esquivel wrote:
>> Hello Fellow Click Users,
>>
>> I was wondering if anyone has had experience getting Click to run on
>> Planet Lab nodes. I heard that it was possible but that was about it.
>> Any advice you may have would be greatly appreciated as I get ready to
>> try to it.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> Sincerely,
>> Holly