PlanetLab Documentation

The documentation listed below is maintained by staff at PlanetLab Operations. If you would like to contribute official documentation, send e-mail to PlanetLab Support.

If you are a member of the PlanetLab Community, feel free to maintain your own documentation on the PlanetLab Wiki and let users know about it.

Guides

Guides are compact tutorials that attempt to present PlanetLab in a "crash course" format. Experienced PlanetLab users may want to read through the guides anyway, as some information has changed since last year.

• User's Guide

  The User's Guide is targeted at users of PlanetLab: researchers, educators, and students who run experiments, develop applications, or maintain services on PlanetLab. The User's Guide contains a short primer on PlanetLab terminology and account maintenance that may be useful for new PIs and Technical Contacts as well.

• PI's Guide

  The PI's Guide is targeted at Principal Investigators: those responsible for overseeing their site's participation in PlanetLab. Some sections of the PI's Guide overlap with the Technical Contact's Guide.

• Technical Contact's Guide

  If you are responsible for installing or administering PlanetLab nodes, read this Guide. If you are a Principal Investigator who has appointed a separate Technical Contact to handle the day-to-day administration of your nodes, you should still read this Guide to gain a basic understanding of node operation.

Frequently Asked Questions

The FAQ provides answers to the most common questions that arise on the users and support mailing lists, and is hosted on the Wiki.

Software and APIs

• BootManager Technical Documentation

  The PlanetLab BootManager is responsible for securely booting nodes into the PlanetLab environment. This document outlines the operation of this component. For motivation behind the design of the BootManager, see the BootManager PDN.

• Node BootCD

  This document describes the operation of, and how to build, PlanetLab node boot cds. Most users will not need to read this, and can simply download a prebuilt cd for their nodes.

• Safe Raw Sockets

  Deprecated. Safe raw sockets enable non-privileged users to access raw network data, including IP, ICMP, UDP, and TCP headers.

• VNET

  VNET is the replacement for safe raw sockets. It supports the safe raw sockets API, but also enables a greater degree of compatibility with standard UNIX raw socket semantics, while maintaining IP isolation between slices. It also supports the notion of proxy sockets for gaining access to unused IP address space donated to PlanetLab.

• Bandwidth Limits

  Bandwidth usage is actively controlled on PlanetLab nodes through a policy of fair share access, similarly to how CPU usage is controlled. If you are performing measurement experiments on PlanetLab, it is essential that you understand how bandwidth usage is controlled in order to qualify your results.

• Proper

  Proper is the Privileged Operations service, a daemon running in the root context on every node that provides slices with a way to perform privileged operations, such as reading files in other slices or opening true raw sockets.

• Slice API

  This interface to the PlanetLab Central database allows for programmatic creation, deletion, and management of dynamic slices.

• Admin API

  This interface allows secure, authorized access to administrative data in the PlanetLab Central database.

Documentation Format

Much of the technical documentation and guides written on and about PlanetLab is in DocBook format. The following guide should be a starting point for writing new documentation.

• PlanetLab Documentation Using DocBook