Overview
The software that accompanies the Tomahawk evaluation tool supports the test jig shown in figure 1. Each traffic server machine is assumed to meet the following minimum requirements:
- Pentium with 1GHz or faster processor
- 512 MB of memory
- Red Hat Linux 7.2 or later (or equivalent Linux distribution)
- Two (2) gigabit Network Interfaces Cards (NICs) for data, assigned to eth0 and eth1. The Intel ProLAN adapters are inexpensive and work great.
- One (1) NIC for management, assigned to eth2
In addition, a management workstation is required to run the traffic control software. This software controls the traffic servers and gathers statistics to report throughput. Ideally, this is a separate machine so that processing on the management workstation does not interfere with processing on the traffic servers, but the traffic control software can also be run on a traffic server in a pinch.
Installation
In the instructions that follow, the prompt % indicates a command should be executed on every traffic server. Otherwise, the prompt av5n% indicates that a command should be run on traffic server n. For example, the prompt av53% indicates that a command should be executed only on traffic server 1.
Step 1
Copy the file qa.tgz and pcaps.tgz to /usr/local on the target system. Create /usr/local/qa using the following sequence of commands:
cd /usr/local
tar xvfz qa.tgz
tar xvfz pcaps.tgz
Step 2
Configure networking by editing, then copying the files in /usr/local/qa/install/etc to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/. Adjust the IPADDR variable in the other files to identify the server. By convention, the IP address of eth0 on server n is 192.168.150.5n and the IP address of eth1 on server n is 192.168.151.5n. For example, the IP address of eth0 on server 1 is 192.168.150.51, and the IP address of eth1 on server 3 is 192.168.151.53. See figures 1. The default configuration is to use DHCP for the management port.
cd /usr/local/qa/install/etc
cat ifcfg-eth0 > /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
cat ifcfg-eth1 > /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1
cat ifcfg-eth2 > /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth2
We use cat to overwrite the existing files, rather than cp, because the files have multiple hard links. Cp breaks those links, cat does not. As a convenience, the script /usr/local/qa/install/etc/install.sh has the cat commands built in.
Alternatively, you can use dhcp to obtain the management IP by copying the file ifcfg-eth2.dhcp to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts /ifcfg-eth2:
cat ifcfg-eth2.dhcp > /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth2
Restart the interfaces to force the changes to take effect:
ifdown eth0
ifdown eth2
ifdown eth1
ifup eth0
ifup eth2
ifup eth1
Step 3
Start the NFS server on server1. First, export the root file system for the NFS performance tests. Add the following lines to /etc/exports on server1:
/ 192.168.150.0/24(rw,no_root_squash)
/ 192.168.151.0/24(rw,no_root_squash)
Run exportfs to get NFS to read the files, and restart the NFS service:
av53% exportfs -a
av53% chkconfig nfs on
av53% service nfs restart
Step 4
Set up servers 2 and 3 to be NFS clients. Add the following line to /etc/fstab on servers 2 and 3:
192.168.150.51:/ /av53 nfs rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14
Create the mount point for NFS on servers 2 and 3:
av54% mkdir /av53
av59% mkdir /av53
Lastly, check to see that you can mount the NFS server on the clients
av54% mount /av53
av59% mount /av53
Step 5
Set up the Web server on server1. Start by locating the directory where HTML content is stored using the following command:
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html"
In this example, the target directory is /var/www/html. Now, untar the files in /usr/local/qa/install/www.tgz into this directory:
av53% cd /var/www/html
av53% tar xvfz /usr/local/qa/install/www.tgz
Start the Web server:
av53% chkconfig httpd on
av53% service httpd restart
Step 6
On all the servers, install ActiveTcl using the following sequence of commands:
av54% cd /usr/local/qa/install/ActiveTcl8.3.4.2-linux-ix86
av54% ./install.sh
Follow the defaults in the prompts.
Step 7
Now you need to set up your environment variables. For your convenience, the shell script /usr/local/qa/install/install.sh will modify $HOME/.bashrc as described in the following steps:
On all the servers, add /usr/local/ActiveTcl/bin and /usr/local/qa/bin to you PATH. This is typically done by adding a line such as one of the following to $HOME/.bashrc, $HOME/.profile, or $HOME/.cshrc.
For a csh or similar shell:
set PATH "/usr/local/ActiveTcl/bin:$PATH:/usr/local/qa/bin"
For a sh or similar shell:
PATH="/usr/local/ActiveTcl/bin:$PATH:/usr/local/qa/bin"
export PATH
For a bash:
export PATH="/usr/local/ActiveTcl/bin:$PATH:/usr/local/qa/bin"
On each server, you must set qatcld to start at runtime. You can configure this setting by adding the following lines to /etc/rc.d/rc.local:
touch /var/lock/subsys/local
rm -f /var/run/qatcld
/usr/local/qa/bin/qatcld.sh &
You can either reboot the server to have these settings take effect or manually execute the above commands to avoid the reboot.
As a final note, in order to run, the Management station must be running X windows server to display the GUI for measuring the traffic load generated by the servers. Linux systems all include the X server. Cygwin (http://cygwin.com) is Windows freeware that includes an X server.