Using the DETER federation tools

Setup

You will need your own copy of the configuration files and scripts that
are exported to remote federated testbeds.  This file is available from 

http://www.isi.edu/~faber/tmp/federation.tgz

The contents of this file are:

federation/HOWTO			This file
federation/fed-tun.pl			Tunnel establishment script
federation/federate.sh			Client testbed node init script
federation/make_hosts			Master testbed node init script
federation/smbmount.pl			Script to mount SMB filesystems
					on client nodes, called from
					federate.sh
federation/splitter.conf.example	Example splitter configuration file
federation/splitter.pl			Main federation script
federation/testbeds.example		Exmaple testbeds config file

federation/testlan.tcl			Example federated topology

You'll also need acces to a tunneling image and a SMB-enabled image for
clients.  Currently these are FBSD61-TUNNEL2 and FBSD62-SMB on DETER in
the emulab-ops project.  Identical images are in DETER and Deter on
Emulab and WAIL.  Eventually federating testbeds will make those images
available to users permitted to federate, but that policy is not in
place.

Configuration files

There are two configuration files:

testbeds	The testbeds that can be federated and their parameters
splitter.conf	The per-experiment parameters (e.g. remote experiment name)

These are documented in the pod documentation for splitter.  You can
view that by:

$ pod2man testbed/federation/splitter.pl | groff -man -Tascii | more

You should be able to use testbeds.example almost completely unchanged.
You will need to change the User parameter to your username on the
various testbeds.  If you're not using the same projects on the various
testbeds (DETER: emulab-ops, WAIL: Deter, Emulab: Deter) those will need
to change as well.  Otherwise the defaults should work for you.

Similarly, the splitter.conf.example file is mostly usable.  Change the
experiment name to avoid collisions.  (The split experiment will be
instantiated using that experiment name on each federated testbed, so it
could collide with others in use).  Make sure the Testbeds parameter
points to the testbeds file you created above and that the ScriptDir
parameter points to the directory that you untarred federation.tgz into.
Just for completeness change the SMBUser to your UID.  The USERS share
should work for you.  It is the share that is exported to remote
testbeds.

Creating an experiment

You have to run splitter on users.isi.deterlab.net.  It depends on a
modified experiment parser that is not widely available, but installed
on users.

To use the given experiment (testlan.tcl) you should be able to run
splitter directly.  I use something like:

$ perl ./splitter.pl -v testlan.tcl

You will be able to watch each testbed swap nodes in on the individual
testbeds.

To split an existing experiment across multiple testbeds, you need to
use the command

tb-set-node-testbed node "testbed"

The node is the result of the [ $ns node ] command and the testbed is a
string that matches an entry in your testbeds file.  Note that DETER has
only 2 connectors and any connection or LAN between nodes on different
testbeds will use up a connector.  Actually up to 2 connections can be
multiplexed on a connector.

Right now, to ensure cross testbed routing works and that the master
testbed files are exported, use FBSD62-SMB as the image on clients.

Let me know if you have questions.  faber@isi.edu