Re: [Testbed-admins] 1. What is a Widearea testbed and 2. Installation of Power Controllers

[Robert P Ricci <ricci@cs.utah.edu>]

Thus spake Manuel Requena on Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 07:09:59PM +0200:
> 1) A widearea testbed
> 
> In the Installation documentation (Initial Switch Setup), you say:
> "These instructions are LOCAL ONLY, meaning if you are only a widearea
> testbed, you can skip this page".
> 
> I would like to know more about what a widearea testbed is. What are the
> main differences between a widearea testbed and a local testbed? What I can
> manage or configure in this widearea testbed? I guess that I cannot
> configure characteristics of the links, but there are some other
> restrictions?
> 
> To test the basic functionalities of your software, could I initially
> configure my nodes as widearea nodes (that I guess it will be simpler) and
> after reconfigure them as local nodes?

We generally consider nodes to be wideara when their network is not
configurable and their boot process is different (eg. they do not
network boot off local server)

At this time, we don't support setting up such nodes for other Emulab
sites.
 
> 2) Power controllers
> 
> We have NBB-1600 power controllers from WTI. I'm trying to install them.
> What kind of entries should I add to 'tbdb'? I have added an entry in
> 'outlets' table, but I guess I need more entries in 'nodes', 'interfaces'
> and 'node_types' tables describing my power controller. 

This documentation is at:
    https://users.emulab.net/trac/emulab/wiki/install/power-control.html
 
> In 'power' file, different functions are called depending on the type of
> power controller. Here I should add my type of controller. I will use
> 'power_rpc27.pm' as an example to integrate my power controllers. Are there
> more examples? I miss anything?

Yes, this is the strategy I would suggest for "porting" to a new power
controller type. Since the range of operations is so limited, it
probably shouldn't bee to hard.

-- 
/-----------------------------------------------------------
| Robert P Ricci <ricci@cs.utah.edu> | <ricci@flux.utah.edu>
| Research Associate, University of Utah Flux Group
| www.flux.utah.edu | www.emulab.net
\-----------------------------------------------------------