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.
Supporting Internet Self Determination at the 2019 Indigenous Connectivity Summit
Last week M-Lab was honored to attend and contribute at the 2019 Indigenous Connectivity Summit (ICS), presented by Internet Society, in Hilo, Hawai’i; and a community network training and building event in the soverign lands of indigenous Hawaiian people, Pu’uhonua o Waimanalo, on the island of Oahu.
M-Lab 2.0 Platform: Global Pilot Assessment
We deployed the new M-Lab platform to 1/3rd of the M-Lab fleet, and now we need to assess whether or not it is a performance regression, relative to the old platform. As long as we can be sure the performance of the new platform does not constitute a regression, then we can roll out the new platform and be confident that we have not made anything worse.
Inspiring Work of Broadband Advocates and Researchers at the Michigan Broadband Summit
The first annual Michigan Broadband Summit was held on Sept. 24, 2019, sponsored by the MERIT research and education network, and it was my pleasure to attend on behalf of M-Lab. 
The gathering was an opportunity to learn more about the amazing work that MERIT, industry, municipalities, cooperatives, school districts and others are doing to improve internet access and service quality in Michigan. I came away inspired by every conversation and presentation, with the keynote from Francella Ochillo from Next Century Cities, and the MERIT team’s presentation of the Moonshot framework being particularly moving.
NDT Dataset - 2 Billion Rows and Growing
While we’ve been hard at work this year on the M-Lab 2.0 Platform Upgrade and Global Pilot, the number of people all over the world runing NDT tests has continued to grow. We collected 2 billion total NDT results between 2009-01-01 and the beginning of the second quarter of 2019, and we are on track to add 500 million just from April through September of this year! We now regularly exceed 3 million NDT tests per day, compared with 2.4 million per day at the end of the first quarter of 2019, 1 million per day two years ago, and 50k per day four years ago.