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Requirements for PingER Monitoring Sites
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Monitor host requirements
The PingER monitoring site provides monitoring host at the site.
This avoids ownership, maintenance, security, and access concerns.
The best place for the host running PingER is close to the
border, e.g. outside the DMZ.
However, this is not necessary since most of the measurements are over
the WAN the
extra delays added by the LAN are minimal.
Many PingER monitoring machines sit inside the LAN at the site.
The host should run Linux.
There are examples of hosts
not running Linux, however, they are not as well supported.
Also the host must be registered in the domain name service (DNS).
Since only pings are sent and processed the cpu requirements are very
minimal. A 500MHz or better PC with at least 128MB RAM, 2GB of disk
space, a 10/100Mbps NIC should be quite adequate. Reliability is
more important. For some sites UPS may be desirable.
Reverse Traceroute
It is also very valuable
if you can run a reverse traceroute server at your site,
for more on reverse traceroute servers see
Reverse Traceroute Servers
Data Collection
You also need to make the data collected from the monitor machine available
for the archive sites to gather. This is usually done via HTTP, if so you
will need a web server with access to the data.
Security Implications
One security implication is that ICMP echo and reply must not be
blocked or rate
limited to this machine. There is no passive capturing of packets.
Also the data collected by the monitor has to be made available,
most sites do this by making the data available from a site web server.
A few sites use FTP, but this is less desirable.
The software uses the standard ping facility by default. It runs at the
user level.
Effort Required
The effort is probably about 0.5 to 1.5 day to initially install the
PingER Tools
Following this there is the occasional request to follow up on some anomaly
usually to do with being unable to collect the data. Also maybe once a year
the list of beacon sites needs updating.
Further effort will be needed to select appropriate hosts/sites to be monitored
and to set up and maintain the local hosts configuration file.
There is a list of
"Beacon" sites that all monitoring hosts are supposed to
monitor for consitency (each monitoring site is free to and
expected to choose its
own extra set of hosts that it is interested in monitoring).
The amount of effort will depend on the
number of hosts/sites monitored and the frequency with which changes are
desired/needed. Typically this is like an hour a week after things
are set up.
Alternatively, if you wish to give us an
account with ssh access on an approriate machine, then we can
install and maintain it for you.
PingER Diskspace
A typical PingER monitoring site can expect to see resource usage as described on our PingER Usage spreadsheet.
Network Overhead
Network overhead is about 100 Bits/sec/pair monitored.
Availability of Reduced Data
The reduced data is available publicly at:
http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/pingtable.pl?from=SLAC&to=WORLD
Revised 02 March 2004
URL:
http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/mon-req.html
Comments to
iepm-l@slac.stanford.edu