I sent a similar mail out a couple of years ago and greatly appreciate the response I got. Time and entropy have done their dirty work, so we're looking for a few (more) good hosts. We've been running a moderate sized (30 node) overlay network and general network research testbed for the last 4 or 5 years. The testbed started as part of the Resilient Overlay Networks project at MIT, and has evolved to support a variety of research by about 15 network researchers at a number of institutions. At this time, the primary institutions involved in the testbed management are MIT, CMU, NYU, and the University of Utah. (Regular NANOG attendees may know Nick Feamster from some talks he's given about routing and automated tools for managing and debugging sets of router configurations. Nick's the MIT contact for the testbed these days.) Our major goal for the testbed is to have access to a "realistic" set of Internet paths - we want to make sure that network research actually takes place in the real world, not a perfect isolated environment. Which is where nanog comes in... What we need is a machine we can place on your network. We will be happy to give you the machine (a PC), which you can use as well for your own work. Ideally, it is best if you can place it outside your firewall (if you have one), since that may simplify logistics at your end. This PC will run a FreeBSD kernel provided by us; all you need to do is to configure (or DHCP) an IP address, and we'll be all set. The machine will have a 10/100 Ethernet interface. We have two options for bandwidth usage. If you'll let us, we'd love to be able to consume a fair bit of it from time to time. Some of our researchers are experimenting with data transfer protocols and more efficient ways of shipping things (like news) around the 'net. However, if you're bandwidth constrained, we do a lot of measurements and other low-bandwidth experiments that benefit greatly from just having a fairly non-intrusive presense. We'd love a BGP feed, or even internal routing feeds, for data collection. We won't be sniffing packets on the network, etc. and we will work to ensure that the machine is as secure as we can make it - most services will be disabled, and the running services will be firewalled, and we'll keep the machine up to date with security patches. (No problems yet, fingers crossed...) What you get in return: a) A locally hosted stratum 1 time source that you're welcome to use or let your clients use. Our machines are CDMA synchronized. b) Our eternal gratitude, love, and acknowledement (and participation / input, if you are interested!) in our research. This also involves free beer if you swing by Pittsburgh. :) c) One of our goals is to create tools that run on the testbed that are useful to their hosts for things like distributed debugging, or the aforementioned BGP configuration debugging tools. We also collect BGP feeds and have a nice interface for searching through the historical data for figuring out what went wrong on the 'net at a particular time. d) Ask! If you have specific network problems/etc., we're always looking for more problems to solve. Your problems are our dinners; we'd like to know what they are and try to create solutions. Please let us know if you can help; we'd appreciate it very much! If so, could you please tell us if: 1. You prefer a small (1U) rack-mountable machine for us to send you as a package, OR 2. If you have, and are willing to, spare your own PC, we can give you a disk image that you can burn, insert, enter an IP address, and be good to go. -Dave -- work: dga at cs.cmu.edu du me: dga@pobox.com Carnegie Mellon University http://www.angio.net/ Department of Computer Science