Introduction to IEPM at SLAC

This page is intended as an introduction to how things are done at SLAC for people involved in development and analysis of Internet End-to-end Performance Monitoring (IEPM), and is of little or no interest to people outside this select group.

Unix at SLAC

The PingER tools and the analysis software are all designed to run on a unix platform. There has been little interest in running on NT, certainly not enough to justify the effort it would take to port the tools. For more details on Unix at SLAC see http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/unix/.

AFS

There are a large number of machines at SLAC, but mostly whichever machine you log onto will present you with the same directories. This little piece of magic is achieved by using file servers. SLAC uses the Network File System (NFS) and the Andrew File System (AFS). Mostly and increasingly AFS is becoming dominant. Familiarity with the advantages and disadvantages of AFS will greatly ease the use of computers at SLAC.

A guide to the public machines at SLAC can be found at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/unix/public-machines.html

The AFS users guide is at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/unix/afs/users-guide/afs-frames.htm

FTP

The programs in the PingER suite are made publically available on the SLAC FTP site. Using a web browser you can see this as ftp://ftp.slac.stanford.edu/software/pinger

Locally, you can access the directory at /afs/slac/public/software/pinger.

The PingER data is archived and available at ftp://ftp-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/iepm

This is locally accessible at /a/nfs01/g.iepm

Package Space

The programs used in production at SLAC (ie not under development) should be installed in the package space. Details on package managemnt at SLAC is available at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/unix/package-maint.html.

www-iepm

The IEPM project has its web home page at http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu

These pages are accessible in local AFS space at /afs/slac/g/www/www-iepm

cgi programs

CGI programs accessible at http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/*, such as http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/pingtable.pl, live in /afs/slac/g/www/cgi-wrap-bin/net/offsite_mon/ and mostly can only be enabled by an entry in the wrapper.

Analysis

Currently the PingER analysis tools are a suite of perl programs which produce a series of tables that can be viewed on the web. These tables are also provided in tab separated format for the user to port into a spreadsheet package. Future reports may also provide datafiles for use with Root and the java analysis studio.