The primary documentation for using the testbed now resides in a central wiki operated by the University of Utah. We also provide below a documentation to some of the unique features of the Schooner testbed along with answers to some of the common questions we receive.

Emulab Wiki

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Contents

• About Schooner
  • What is Schooner?
  • Who is eligible to use it?
  • How do I get started?
  • What hardware is available?
  • This is a lot like Emulab.net isn't it?
  • Who to contact for questions?
  • Is there a terminal server for the PCs?
• About our Routing Hardware
  • What is the Scenarios system?
  • What about exclusive access?
  • How do I get access to the router console?
  • Can I change the router configuration?

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About Schooner

• What is Schooner?

  Schooner is a user-configurable lab environment built on real hardware that is available to the scientific community. Schooner runs on the Wisconsin Advanced Internet Laboratory (WAIL), which is located in the computer science department at UW-Madison. Users can select hardware from a pool of 64 PCs and more than 30 Cisco routers, including models Cisco12000, Cisco7000 series, Cisco3600 and Cisco2600.

• Who is eligible to use it?

  Schooner is primarily for academic use. Any academic research group is welcome to apply for a project and use schooner for their research. Schooner is also available to students for student projects. Instructors interested in having schooner available to their students should contact us.

• How do I get started?

  If you do not already have a Schooner account apply for one. You can either apply to start a new project or to join an existing project. If there are other people you are working with have the leader start a project and the others join the project. We will review your application and respond as quickly as possible, usually within a day or two. Once you have an account log on, poke around, and check out the documentation and tutorials.

• What hardware is available?

  Currently the WAIL Equipment List consists of:
  
  - 80 PC's: Intel 2Ghz Pentium 4, 1GB RAM, Intel 1Gbps NIC
  - 6 Cisco GSR 12000: OC48, OC12, OC3, GE, FE interfaces
  - 4 Cisco 7500: OC3, GE, FE, Serial interfaces
  - 10 Cisco 7300: GE interfaces
  - 5 Cisco 7200: GE, FE, OC3, Serial interfaces
  - 5 Cisco 3600: FE interfaces
  - 4 Cisco 2600: FE interfaces
  
  New equipment is added on a regular basis - if there is something you need, let us know - we may have it.

• This is a lot like Emulab.net isn't it?

  Yes it is. Schooner is based on the Emulab.net software and the Emulab folks have been of great assistance in bringing Schooner up and getting it running. We diverge from Emulab.net in our focus on using real world router hardware.

• Who should I contact for more questions?

  If you have further questions about the Schooner environment send us an email: testbed-ops@schooner.wail.wisc.edu

• Is there a terminal server for the PCs?

  Yes. To access the serial console for a PC you will first need to log in to ops.schooner.wail.wisc.edu. Then use the console command to connect to the serial console you would like, for example:

  console pc-i5-46-a
  

  The serial console program has a number of features including replaying previous lines, the man page is a good resource on the available commands.

About our Routing Hardware

• What is the Scenarios system?

  The "Scenarios" system was the original framework utilized to configure hardware routing resources on the testbed. The testbed software now allows you to specify a hardware router just like a regular PC, and the Scenarios system has been disabled.

• What about exclusive access?

  By default scenarios are non-exclusive meaning that the hardware they run on may be running other scenarios simultaneously with yours (on other ports). This is generally fine for educational and basic debugging purposes. However for performance measurements and other sensitive experiments you may want exclusive access.

  If you specify an exclusive resource policy by adding 'exclusive' as a third argument to tb-scenario-load then you are guaranteed that no other scenarios will be running on your hardware at the same time as you. This uses more resources and is thus less likely to be available. You can check the availability of scenarios for shared or exclusive resource policies in the Scenarios page.

• How do I get access to the router console?

  Console access to router hardware is only available to scenarios running in an exclusive resource policy (see previous question). In such a situation you can access the router consoles as follows. First you need to find the name of the actual hardware running your scenario. In your e-mail or in the experiment page there will be a display of the scenarios you are using, which instances they are using, and the physical mapping for that instance. Once you know the physical name of the router you can telnet to it from ops. Login using your schooner login and password.

  Note that the instance and thus underlying physical hardware can change with each swap in of the experiment. Be sure to check your e-mail or the experiment page for the correct router name.

  Be aware that if you have user level trust in your group then you will only have non-enabled (read-only) access to the router.

• Can I change the router configuration?

  Yes, you can change all the configuration in the router as long as you have local_root or better privalages in your project and specified exclusive access to your scenario (see above). Just keep in mind that there is a management IP address and if you remove it you'll be locked out of the router console.