[atlas] Encouraging people to upgrade software probe versions

Hi Robert,

The existence of software probes is great, but instead (or besides) of providing packages or source code, why not distribute a prebuild VM as OVF file?

Advantages:
- The RIPE Atlas team manages the whole OS, like it's doing for the hardware probes. Thus, updates can be deployed whenever needed.
- You can even use OpenWRT as VM operatingsystem. This means all the same premises/conditions as for hardware probes.
- an OVF file is easier to deploy, for the community
- RXTXRPT switch is obsolete
- No more false RXTXRPT data, since the report counts all traffic of the host, not only the traffic that is generated by the SW probe application.

Is there an actual reason, why it was decided to let users manage the software probe installation?
Please consider to distribute a prebuild VM *additionally* to the existing ways and see what happens. I'm sure, most new users will choose a prebuild VM.


BR,
Simon


On 19.01.23 12:48, Robert Kisteleki wrote:
>
> That is reasonable; the difference is that we are not in control; the host OS is. Redhat/Fedora/derivatives as well as Debian/derivatives have an official solution to this via their package management services and I believe this is the standard way (surely with exceptions :-) ) of handling these matters. We are in the process of adopting these.
>
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