News

Friday Oct. 9, we will be moving the emulator system into an isolation chamber to shield it from the various wireless networks in our building. For the move we will need to shutdown the hardware from about 10am – 4pm EDT. Please make sure to swapout any experiments and logout of emucontrol-1 before 10am tomorrow.

The move to the new machine room has been completed. This was a major undertaking, and it took longer than expected, but all systems should be back up. For the emulator, please send mail to emulator-help@cs.cmu.edu if you have problems. Also, we have a backlog of application requests that I can now approve.

There are two problems relating to recent configuration changes on our testbed:

• The new OSImages I have made and set as default for nodes of type pcd610 have some problems causing the nodeDaemon facility not to function. If you use this facility, please explicitly set your node-os to something else when using these nodes until I fix the default. If you don't use nodeDaemon or if your ns file already sets the node-os explicitly, you will not be affected
• The changes to dotfiles I made to a number of user accounts do not provide settings sufficient to running nodeDaemon even on images capable of doing so.

Because of some lab rearranging, the emulator system in the wireless lab (i.e. emucontrol-1 and all of the wireless nodes) will be shutdown Friday (8/28) from about 12pm-5pm.

On Monday or Tuesday, Aug 24-25, we will be renaming the emulator controller to emucontrol-1.ece.cmu.edu, which is its original name. The temporary name emucontrol-new.ece.cmu.edu will no longer work.

pcemu112 has been taken offline because of a recent hardware issue. You will not be able to swapin to this node even though it appears to be free. The 'News' site will be updated when the node is available again.

The wireless emulator testbed will be down from 10pm EDT Sunday Aug-9 until about 10am Monday Aug-10 because of a scheduled power outage on campus.

CMUlab and the wireless emulator testbed will be briefly down for an upgrade on Aug 31, starting at 5pm EDT.

The emulab system at CMU will be unavailable from the 14th to the 16th of August as we move into our new facility in the Gates Center.

The wireless emulator is being used by students in a wireless networking course for their course project. Projects are due May 1, so we expect the wireless emulator to be very busy until then.

As part of a recent software upgrade, the mechanism for authentication used by emulatorDaemon has changed. There are two concrete changes. First, you need to generate a new key by going to https://boss.cmcl.cs.cmu.edu/gensslcert.php3 and dropping the generated key into ~/.ssl/emulab.pem. Second, you will now need to specify a password when you run emulatorDaemon. More details are provided in the Setting up your account page.

We have scheduled an upgrade of the CMUlab software for Tuesday 2/17, at 5pm Pittsburgh time. Please make sure you do not have any experiments swapped in at that time. We expect this to be a quick upgrade.

The upgrade of the CMUlab boss/ops has been completed so the emulator is available again. There should be no changes to the way you define and execute experiments. Note also that we made no changes to the emulator software, i.e. the code you run on emucontrol-1. If you have problems or see something odd, please send mail to emulator-help@cs.cmu.edu right away.

The emulator is down while boss and ops are being upgraded. We will posted an announcement here when the system is available again.

We just released a major update on the documentation for the wireless network emulator - see www.cs.cmu.edu/~emulator. We restructured the documentation, added pages on some missing topics, and filled in the javadocs. If you see problems, please let us know so we can continue to improve the documentation.

We need to upgrade the emulab/protogeni software on CMUlab. The emulator will not be usable while the upgrade is taking place. We plan to start the upgrade on Wednesday 12/17 in the afternoon, or early on Thursday 12/18. This is a major update so it could take us several days to get things working properly. We will post more details later in the week.

The emulator will be shut down overnight tonight due to a scheduled power outage for the campus. The system will be off from about 10:00pm 11/11 until 10:00am 11/12 EDT.

We have updated the verilog code on main DSP as well as the java classes for emuRun, so that the system is now able to support 15 nodes at the same time.

Currently, the 10-node Emulator (pcemu101 - pcemu110) is availble to external users again.

Those xml files are still valid except that the multipath is between pecmu107 and pecmu108. Please make sure to update your multipath definition in the xml file before you start the emuRun.

The upgrade is going more slowly than originally planned. We will lock up the emulator from external users again on 10/16 After 2:30 EDT until later that evening.

The emulator will soon be expanding to 15 nodes, but to upgrade the system we will need to reserve the whole testbed on Wednesday Oct. 15 from 2:30 until about 8:00 EDT. Please avoid swapping experiments in at this time.

The emulator is up and running.

We have been having problems with the backup power for the emulator so we had to take the system down. It should be back up later today, Sept 29.

We have added USRP software radios to nodes pcemu108-pcemu110 in the emulator. We are still in the testing phase, so the USRP devices are not (yet) available to external users. In this experimental phase, if you experience problems with pcemu108-pcemu110 please let us know asap by sending mail to emulator-help@cs.cmu.edu

The emulator project will present a demo of the emulator at MobiCom 2008 in San Francisco. We will need dedicated use of the emulator system for the demo on Tuesday, September 16, 3-6pm pacific time (6-9pm EDT). Thank you for your understanding.

We have been having experiencing problems with the communication link between the emulator channel hardware and the host computer. Before running an experiment on emucontrol-1.ece.cmu.edu make sure that there is a link with the hardware by running 'ping 10.0.0.1.' If there is no response email emulator-help@cs.cmu.edu immediately so we can fix the problem.

The emulator system is up and running!

Due to a power failure, the emulator is temporarily unavailable. We will post an update when it is back online.