Glasnost: Hosting a test server

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The goal of our Glasnost research project to make the Internet edge networks more transparent to end users. To learn more about how the Glasnost tool works and how we detect BitTorrent blocking, please refer to the README file of the source distribution.

A list of active Glasnost servers can be found here. Currently, all Glasnost test servers are hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) in Germany. Our servers are currently overloaded. Besides, it would help to gather and compare data from test servers located in different locations around the world.

If you are interested in contributing to our project, please consider hosting a Glasnost server. You can find more detailed information on how to host the test server on this webpage.

How to contribute

You can contribute to this project by deploying Glasnost on your server.

To install and run Glastnost, you have to make sure that your server meets the following requirements:

• Well-connected, non-firewalled server: This is required to allow accurate measurements.
• Linux OS: Our tool was developed for Linux. If you want to run our code on a different platform, please contact us.
• Webserver (e.g., apache2) with PHP 4.2 or newer
• Several GB of storage for log files and traces.
• libpcap 0.8. This library is used to dump packet traces of the transfers. To be able to compile Glasnost, you also need the header files of this library; for most Linux distribution, you have to install the appropriate development package.
• zlib. This library is used to zip the dumped packet traces of the transfers.
• Note for shared webservers: Glasnost currently does not work for webservers that use virtual sites as it calls the webserver by IP and not DNS name. We are working on a fix for that.

The Glasnost tool is part of our ongoing research to make access network deployments more transparent to end users. When deploying Glasnost on your server, please give us access to the collected logs and traces. This would enable us to include the data collected at your site on our central results page. More details on how to give us access can be found below.

How to get the source code

You can download the source code of our testing tool as a tarball or via anonymous SVN:

You can download the latest version of Glasnost here: glasnost-1.2.tgz
The latest version of our Glasnost tool is always available from anonymous SVN. You can check it out using the following command:

svn checkout https://svn.mpi-sb.mpg.de/NS/glasnost/

This will create a directory called glasnost and fill it with the Glasnost source code.

We are interested in your feedback. If you want to report a bug or contribute a patch, please contact us.

How to set up a Glasnost server

The following steps describe how to set up a Glasnost test server. You will need make, gcc, and libpcap to build the sources.

1. Download the source code of Glasnost. If you downloaded the tarball, untar it. Make sure you meet all the requirements mentioned above.
2. Copy the newly created directory with all its files to the server on which you want to install the tool.
3. Type make to build the sources and to adjust all necessary file rights.
   In more detail, make builds the server process bt_client (note that you will need libpcap for this) and also automatically
   • sets the suid bit for bt_client as it uses a raw socket to capture packets:

     su -c chmod a+s bt_client

   • makes the logs-directory world-writeable:
     

     chmod 777 logs

   The tool will not run if you skip this step!
4. By default, all log files and traces will be stored in the logs directory. For privacy reasons, this directory should not be publicly readable as it contains the packet-level traces of the test transfers. Edit the file logs/.htaccess to password protect this directory. Details on how to do this are contained in the .htaccess file itself.
   
   We request you to grant us access to this directory and allow us to download the traces your server collects for strictly research puproses. We will eventually release the logs after ensuring that the data is properly anonymized. Please email us on how to access this directory on your server. Note that this directory just contains the logs and traces written by Glasnost and no other logs or data from your webserver.
   
5. Our tool assumes that the name of your server's network interface is 'eth0'. This will be correct for most servers. If your server uses another interface to send and receive its traffic, you will have to change the variable $eth in the head of the file 'bt.php'.
6. Test your setup: Browse the glasnost directory from your web browser and run 'selftest.php'. The server process bt_client will write any error messages to the file logs/stderr.
7. After you set up your server, email us. Tell us the URL of your installation and how to access the logs on your server. We will then add your site to our list of test servers and redirect users to your server.

If you have any problems or questions, do not hesitate to contact us.

Contact

If you have questions, feedback, or need assistence setting up your server, you can contact us via e-mail:

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