More RIPE47 followup

["Henk Uijterwaal (RIPE NCC)" <]

Dear All,

This is a follow-up on a question raised during the AOB session of the TTM
meeting @ RIPE47.  Two potentially interesting developments were discussed
there:

1. OWAMP.

   As you probably know, TTM implements RFC's 2679 and 2680 for its one
   way loss and delay measurements.  These RFC's specify HOW to measure
   these quantities, but leave details like packet format and set-up
   of measurement sessions open.   As a result, TTM is incompatible with
   other products implementing the same metrics.

   OWAMP (One Way Active Measurement Protocol) is an attempt to solve this
   by specifying packet formats and setup sequences.  For a full
   description, see:

       http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ippm-owdp-07.txt

   The question I have is whether this protocol should be added to
   the TTM service.

   For measurements between TTM TB's, there won't be a difference.
   However, it would allow TB's to measure between them and boxes from
   other vendors and, as a first guess, immediately add 50-100 measurement
   targets between TB's and boxes from other services (mainly Surveyor
   boxes in North America).

   Adding this is a non-trivial amount of work, so before putting this
   on any NCC workplan, I'd like to have some feedback if there is
   interest in adding this feature.

2. Delay Tomography, SCoLE

   At the last RIPE meeting, 2 authors presented tools that take the
   delays between test-boxes and use that information to estimate delays
   between other hosts on the Internet.  I'm interested to hear if anybody
   has any thought on the role that the RIPE NCC should play here:

   Some possibilities are:

   a) No.
   b) We put pointers to the tools on our website (and/or we make the
      source code easily available).
   c) (b) plus We install the tools ourselves, make sure that they work
               and provide some description how to install them yourself.
   d) (c) plus We actively maintain the software and include
               testing/fixing as part of upgrade paths.
   e) (d) plus We add a webinterface or similar, allowing you to use
               the tool with little/no local installation.

   There are probably more possibilities. However, they all have in common
   (except for doing nothing, of course) that they consume resources, so
   before spending cycles on this, I like to know your opinions on this.
   If such tools were made available, would you use them?

Any comments, either to the list or to me privately, are appreciated,

Henk

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Henk Uijterwaal                             Email: henk.uijterwaal@localhost
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