On 18.06.2013, at 20:07 , Daniel Suchy <danny@danysek.cz> wrote:
Hello, maybe should be interesting providing RIPE Atlas probe as an virtual appliance (VMWare, XEN, VirtualBox etc). Handling will be much easier and deployment cheaper (as no extra hardware will be required to run new probe).
Virtual apliance should be still managed by RIPE NCC (like current hardware probes) in terms of upgrades and so on.
I think this may be interesting to consider.
With regards, Daniel
From https://atlas.ripe.net/about/faq/ : Why did you choose a hardware solution instead of software? With a pure software solution, distribution costs are low and the number of potential hosts is very large. However, there are several significant downsides to a pure software approach: • Host machines may not run continuously over long periods, which affects our ability to gather round-the-clock measurements. • Measurements can be influenced by sharing systems and network resources with other applications on the host computer. • It is often not possible to install software like this in a corporate or computer centre environment. • It is easier to tamper with the results. This is also why we chose not to release a software version in tandem with the hardware solution. Because of these drawbacks, we opted to develop the RIPE Atlas probe as a stand-alone piece of hardware.