Requirements for WAN Hosts being Monitored

Les Cottrell and Tom Glanzman, Last Update: February 26, 2000

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[ SLAC Computer Services (SCS) | Network Group | Computer Networking | WAN Monitoring ]


Introduction

We have been plagued with problems with our wide-area network. Often these problems are simply that the network link has insufficient capacity to handle the traffic. Other problems reflect poorly configured or malfunctioning equipment. It is often difficult and frustrating to follow up on problems between SLAC and your site. SLAC and others have developed a set of tools, called PingER, to aid in the identification and diagnosis of some types of networking problems. A number of SLAC collaborator sites are already participating in this monitoring program which has helped to solve real problems.

The program currently has several components and provides these services:

Ping.
SLAC periodically pings a selected machine at the collaborator site with 100 and 1000 byte messages, then records the result (elapsed time, lost packets). These records are automatically accumulated over time and converted into a variety of tables and plots, all of which are viewable via WWW.
Traceroute server.
One can determine the network path between two sites (in general, there may be different paths in each direction) for the purposes of identifying bottlenecks and outages. A simple cgi script (for your WWW server) can provide the path from the WWW server back to the requester. The net result of this program is that it facilitates communication between networking experts at SLAC and other sites, provides a long-term record of network performance and enables a certain amount of diagnosis when a problem is suspected. For some examples of such reverse traceroute servers see: Traceroute Servers for HENP & ESnet.

Requirements of the Remote Node/Site

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Owner: Les Cottrell