CAIDA : tools : measurement : coralreef

Hardware Requirements

For detailed hardware requirements and questions, see the hardware section in the FAQ. Since an optical fiber carries only one direction of traffic, you will need two cards if you wish to monitor both directions of a fiber optic link.

The system you will need:

1 GX motherboard (preferably the Tyan Thunder 100 S1836DLUAN-GX)
1 400+MHz PII/III CPU
1 Ethernet card (on-board on the Tyan) (Any FreeBSD compatible card will do)
1 6+ GB hard drive (preferably UW/SCSI, as the Tyan has it on-board. Other motherboards will need a SCSI card).
1 VGA AGP video card (any brand, as long as it can do console)
1 case/power supply (rack mounted). We use 19 inch Industrial Rack-mount Computer SERIES, Model No. 566i2
Memory: >=256Mb and make sure it's ECC
If you decide to get a different motherboard then the one we recommended make sure you get a UW SCSI controller. We found out that the Adaptec 2940UW serves our needs well.
You also need all the standard computer stuff like keyboard (mouse is not needed), cables etc

The cards that are known to work:

OC3, ATM: ForeRunner 200E (on FreeBSD)
OC12 and OC3, ATM: Applied Telecom POINT cards Multimode (on FreeBSD). NB: Apptel has discontinued production of their POINT products.
OC12 and OC3, ATM and POS: WAND DAG cards (on Linux).

FreeBSD Installation

We will assume a FreeBSD 3.2-RELEASE installation, although earlier/later versions should work. Boot off the FreeBSD install disks to begin the installation. Choose the 'skip kernel config, continue with install.' option. Go to 'custom' and select 'partition' to setup the hard drives.

Partitioning the Disk

Assuming the disk is already partitioned with DOS/win, to use the entire disk for FreeBSD, select 'd' to delete the current slice and 'a' to add a new slice. This will tell FreeBSD what areas of the disk it can use, this is not a partitioning into data/swap/etc.. If it prompts you, select 'use partition entry' to create compatible partitions. Once done, accept the 'standard' MBR boot manager. Select the 'label' option now. With this, we will partition the slice. Select 'a' to use the auto-defaults or configure to your liking. Our configuration is to resize the auto-default's /usr to 2G ('d' to delete /usr then 'c' to create /usr with a size of 2G) and use the rest of the space for /home. We are done partitioning, so go to the 'distributions' choice.

Selecting the Distribution

Select the 'X-User' choice from the distributions menu. If it asks you, select to use DES. Select to install the ports collection as well. When the X setup screen pops up, just go to 'exit' as the defaults are sane. Exit the distribution menu and go to the media menu.

Selecting the Media

We will select to install via FTP, although you can do otherwise. Select a ftp site close to you, for example, ftp3.freebsd.org. Select the network device to download on, for our installs we use 'fxp0', the Intel EtherExpress Pro 10/100 card that comes on the motherboard. Set your network configuration and 'commit' the changes to start the install. Once done it should prompt you if you want to configure further, say yes.

System Configuration

In the 'distributions' option select compat22 for early FreeBSD compatibility and src/sys for the kernel source. In the 'packages' option you might want to install some things to make your environment comfortable for you like bash, tcsh, joe, etc.. Set the root password to something secure, exit and reboot.

ATM card Install and Configuration

Turn off the machine and install the two cards, either 2 POINT cards or 2 FORE cards, in the second and third PCI slots from the bottom of the motherboard (the ISA slot is on the very bottom). The card in slot 3 is the '0' numbered device, and the card in slot 2 will be the '1' numbered device; for example, '/dev/fatm0' and '/dev/fatm1'. Boot the machine and untar/gz the CoralReef distribution like 'tar -xzvf coral-3.2.1.tar.gz'. Run './configure' to configure the CoralReef distribution and then 'make depend', 'make', and 'make install' to install the CoralReef tools into their default location of '/usr/local/Coral'. Read the 'drivers/INSTALL' file in the CoralReef source directory. Follow those directions to get the driver source for your cards copied into the kernel and built. If you are not familiar with rebuilding a kernel, you can follow these steps. Copy the 'GENERIC' file in the '/usr/src/sys/i386/conf' directory to the name you want this kernel to be known as, for example, 'caida'. Run 'config (kernel name)' to prepare this kernel for building. Change directory to '/usr/src/sys/compile/(kernel name)'. Run 'make depend' then 'make'. If all goes well, run 'make install' and reboot.

Security

To lock down the CoralReef box, we need to change a few FreeBSD settings. Edit '/etc/defaults/rc.conf' and set these options:

inetd_enable="NO"
rpc_statd_enable="NO"
portmap_enable="NO"
sendmail_enable="NO"

This will keep unneeded services from running. You will probably want to install ssh so you can securely connect to the CoralReef box remotely. To do this, go to '/usr/ports/security/ssh', set the environment variable 'USA_RESIDENT' to 'YES' if you are a United States resident, then run 'make' and 'make install'.