Run a private ndt-server (updated)
Back in 2019, I wrote about how to install the open source ndt-server that M-Lab uses, on a server of your own. Our goal is that others can use M-Lab’s tools to measure their own networks. This post is an update, with a couple more features.
M-Lab's Murakami Tool - Supporting Structured Research Data Collection from the User Perspective
Many people know M-Lab and our TCP performance test, NDT, from running it in a web browser. Perhaps the largest single source of NDT tests comes from its integration by the Google Search team. While M-Lab is known for the large volume of crowdsourced test data resulting from people running our tests, over the past few years we’ve developed new ways to run our tests and open source Internet measurement tests from other platforms using a tool we’ve called Murakami.
Updates to ndt7
In the past month we’ve made several improvements to ndt-server, ndt7-client-js, and ndt7-client-go. If you have any questions about the following, please comment on the relevant Github issues.
Running Your Own ndt-server
If you’ve followed the M-Lab blog over the past year and a half, you’ll know that we’ve been engineering and testing a massive upgrade to our server software and how it’s managed and deployed [1] [2] [3] [4]. That’s been a ton of work, and our team is excited to now complete the migration from the PLC/vserver platform to the new k8s stack.
We expect some great derivative outcomes of migrating to Docker and Kubernetes both for ourselves in managing the platform and measurement tests we host, and for the community as well. In particular, the NDT server was completely rewritten in Golang, and being fully “dockerized” the server is now portable and usable outside of the M-Lab platform by others. This is really exciting because not only can M-Lab use our tools to measure the public Internet, but anyone can run our server now to measure their network privately using the same methods and tools. This post kicks off a series of blogs that will demonstrate various ways to use M-Lab server and client tools, starting with ndt-server.