What happened this week:

• Helped Grace get up to speed with the KVM/Libvirt knowledge required to run an openstack instance. Also touched on how the virtual networking inside openstack works and how linux bridging works. I believe we're pretty close to having a working cloud controller and I've begun building a second server which will be used as a compute server in our "cloud".

• Spent a bit of time working on bearwall and with the help of Chris Browning released version 1.08 which you can get from http://bearwall.org

• Started building a looking-glass server for use at Wand, found bird-lg which looks quite shiny. Have deployed bird-lg in a testing environment at the moment, in talks with an ISP for a BGP feed that will carry a full route table.

• Got the ENEL211 marking system up and running for an assignment that is coming up soon.

So my plan this week had been to add the ability to readd flows to a switch when it comes back up in a full mesh topology. But I decided that the full mesh solution would be different enough from a non mesh solution that I wasnt going to gain much in the longer term by adding this. So instead I started adding support for non full mesh topologies.

So rfserver now calculates shortest paths between switches, but doesnt actually use them. It will update whenever a switch comes up, but doesnt fix paths broken when a switch goes down.

Started work on the new AMP throughput test. It's based upon the old one but rewritten to be more flexible and support IPv6. The basic test is running as a standalone test. I still have to work on the reporting side, along with implementing some additional options like RFC 4898 (i.e. Web10G) statistics.

Worked on adding an additional compute node to the current one-node installation of Openstack. Ran into some snags. Will be installing the additional compute node on a new machine.

This week I began the creating an automatic script to test cloud software for vulnerablilities. Although It is not yet finished I don't invisage it taking to much longer

Continued to have a look into layer 2 loops this week. Played around with my controller a bit, so that for known typologies it would stop broadcast loops as well as continue to use the shortest path between switches.

Some further optimisation of scamper memory usage was carried out using test runs on Yoyo.

Negotiations with CAIDA about the use of Ark nodes has been carried out, and testing is to begin soon.

A test run of ICMP data collection is being carried out on planetlab. ICMP data collection will be carried out there, while UDP and TCP data will be collected on Ark.

Investigation into the Internet Simulator has been carried out to see why a subset of possible simulations based on the available paramenter levels was carried out. I have been learning about the diagnostic programs that come with IS0 including how to make graphs.

This week I've managed to test out the rotation code on a video and early results look promising. Now I've got to start working on XY translation and getting the code to support videos instead of two frames. Then I can compare it to other implementations.

Had a chat to Richard Sanger about adding web10g data to the AMP
throughput test and got him set up with the current code.

Finished porting the main part of the http test to the new AMP. It runs
fine as a standalone program, but I still need to add the new style of
reporting to be able to send test data back to the collector.

Started packaging the new AMPlet code for Debian to make installation and
distribution easier for testing. It's a little bit more involved than I
thought it would be, as the build process has become a lot more automagic
since I last created a package from scratch.

Finished up the 513 marking (eventually!) and released the marks to the students.

Released a new version of libtrace -- 3.0.17.

Started working on releasing some new public trace sets. Waikato 8 is now available on WITS and the DSL traffic from our 2009 ISP traces will hopefully soon follow. In the process, I found a couple of little glitches in traceanon that I was able to fix before the libtrace release.

Decided that our anomaly detection code does not handle time series that switch from constant to noisy and back again particularly well. A classic example is latency to Google: during working hours it is noisy, but it is constant other times. We detect the switch, but only after a long time. I would like to detect this change sooner and report it as an event (although not necessarily alert on it). I've started looking into an alternative method of detecting the change in time series style based on a pair of sliding windows: one for the last hour, one for the previous 12 hours before that. It is working better, but is currently a bit too sensitive to the effect of an individual outlier.