17–21 Sept 2012
Clarion Conference Centre
Europe/Prague timezone

HINTS network trouble shooting - Latest news

18 Sept 2012, 16:30
30m
Virgo (Clarion Conference Centre)

Virgo

Clarion Conference Centre

Presentation EGI Operations (Tiziana Ferrari: track leader) Network Support

Speaker

Olivier Lenormand (CNRS)

Printable Summary

HINTS (”Hints for Instantaneous Network TroubleShooting”) is a lightweight quick network troubleshooting tool, delivered to the GRID end user as a WEB page.
With "probes" installed in Grid sites, one can run on-demand basic bidirectional tests (Ping, Traceroute, Nmap, DNS resolving, Iperf) between two of this probes.
On the server side, the registered users can involve only probes they are allowed to use in their tests.
By using HINTS, a user does not require any specific network privilege to run basic tests between two GRID sites, thus preventing the involvement of the network administrators at the first diagnostic actions.

This presentation should be attended by Network Support NGI representatives and anyone from the Network Support Community.

Link for further information

https://aresu.dsi.cnrs.fr/spip.php?rubrique27

Wider impact of this work

Provide the EGI GRID user community with a lightweight, easy tool to perform on-demand network troubleshooting.

Description of the work

Originally developed within EGEE SA2, HINTS has been endorsed as the suggested tool for Network Troubleshooting on demand by the EGI Network Support.
In this presentation the overall structure and basic principles of HINTS will be described, together with the deployment carried out so far and the provided functionality.
Work has been carried out on the packaging to provide easily deployable probes for site administrators.

The recent work on HINTS consists mainly in:
- Providing SL5 binaries (today, only SL6 binaries are available)
- Thinking of HINTS as a service more than a server and its probes. The idea would be to provide a "community" HINTS server, preventing every NGI from installing and running their own HINTS server. By delivering such a service, installing HINTS would be much easier and effortless to run.
- Though HINTS' probes are heavily based on PerfSONAR MDM "Measurement Points", someone using both systems today has to install both binaries, and moreover, on two separated servers.
In a join initiative with the PerfSONAR MDM team, we are working on letting HINTS server use already installed PS Measurement Points. Again, the purpose is to make HINTS easier to install, and particularly this point would greatly increase the number of usable probes. And of course, an NGI would no more have to run two different servers, one for PF's Measurement Point, and one for HINTS' probe.

Primary author

Co-author

Dr Mario Reale (GARR)

Presentation materials