During today's maintenance, the host keys for all outward-facing SSH servers (and possibly some others) were reset. This change was part of a regular security update from the Debian maintainers, related to a recently found bug in the random number generator used to generate the previous host keys. When you log in to ORBIT servers using SSH, you will probably see a message like the following. (...)
Please note we have moved weekly maintenance from Thursday to Wednesday afternoons, from 3:00PM to 5:00PM EST.
We started replacing internal power supplies with external ones and the progress can be monitored here. New power supplies are 200 W FSP200-50PLA2 This round of replacement doesn't have aesthetic qualities of the original (as can be seen in the attached picture) but definitely solves the reliability problem. And the pile of old internal power supplies is growing (if anybody has an idea of what to do with them please let us know). It is expected that the upgrade will be completed, at least for the failed units, in the next two-three weeks. (...)
Effective immediately, we'll be using the following policies to try to ensure that access to the grid and sandboxes is allocated fairly and efficiently. Also, these policies should make planning out your time on ORBIT more reliable. (...)
ORBIT is a two-tier laboratory emulator/field trial network testbed designed to achieve reproducibility of experimentation, while also supporting evaluation of protocols and applications in real-world settings.
The laboratory-based wireless network emulator uses a novel approach involving a large two-dimensional grid of 400 802.11 radio nodes which can be dynamically interconnected into specified topologies with reproducible wireless channel models.
Once the basic protocol or application concepts have been validated on the lab emulator platform, users can migrate their experiments to the field trial network which provides a configurable mix of both high-speed cellular (3G) and 802.11 wireless access in a real-world setting.
Orbit is seeded by a $5.45M/4yr grant from the NSF under the Networking Research Testbeds (NRT) program. The project is a collaborative effort between several university research groups in the NY/NJ region: Rutgers, Columbia, and Princeton, along with industrial partners Lucent Bell Labs, IBM Research and Thomson. ORBIT is being developed and operated by WINLAB, Rutgers University. A parallel set of experimental work packages (EWP) was also funded by NSF in order to drive user requirements during the design of the testbed and also provide benchmarks for the usability and effectiveness of the testbed in performing different types of wireless experiments with ease.
The testbed is available for remote or on-site access by other research groups nationally. Additional research partners and testbed equipment/software contributors are actively sought from both industry and academia.
