Some clearence required on the way centinel program works and some queries on the way to add custom tools in it. about centinel

[arianniaki]

About running customized experiments: We haven't used scapy in our centinel code but I don't think you are limited to centinel.primitives. You can always contribute and add code there. Unfortunately, we don't have further documentation than the Wiki section to customize functionality.

About running an experiment in different locations: our ICLab server takes care of sending the proper schedule files for each of the vantage points in different locations to run.
So we take care of writing the schedules on the server side.

I suggest that you first focus on adding your experiment to centinel.
The centinel communicates with our ICLab server. The default pipeline of centinel includes fetching a schedule from the server and running the baseline experiment which includes testing TCP/DNS/HTTP/Traceroute given a set of URLs and then uploading the result to our server.
Running that experiment on all ICLab nodes is not going to be a problem if you can modify the centinel code to run your experiment on your machine.

[sahilgupta221]

@arianniaki
Thanks Arian for clarification.
I already ran baseline.py experiments testing all sort of traceroute present there.

Now I want to run two different traceroutes viz UDP and TLS traceroute.
For this I need to have some clarification on:

1. How this centinal system work between my machine and ICLAB nodes?
2. How user can decide on geography of nodes where he want to deploy the program.

First part helps me to understand if I use my own python libraries and system interfaces like regex, os, ssl, socket, etc., will it run directly on ICLAB nodes or do I need to do some modification to some server side programs and send patch to you guys.
Bit of idea on centinel and other server side programs running on ICLAB nodes, will help me to better create/test my programs.

Second part helps me to focus on countries of our interest with respect to whom we want to make the observations.
We don't want all ICLAB nodes running our program.

[arianniaki]

1. The centinel code that you have cloned from github is running on its own and you cannot control other ICLab nodes with it. The centinel code on your machine only contacts our ICLab server to fetch the schedule file for the experiment, the input URLs, and to upload the results to our server. If you create a modified experiment that uses other libraries then it will directly run on the ICLab nodes.
2. That needs to be coordinated with us since our ICLab server is in charge of sending schedule files to ICLab nodes.

Once you have written your experiment and confirm that it works, please refer to the "How to contribute code to Centinel" page on our wiki to send a pull request with your modified experiment. Then please contact us so we can coordinate on how you want your experiment to be performed and in which countries.

[sahilgupta221]

@arianniaki
That's great.
I will contact again after completing experiments.
Thanks a lot!
:)