[ixp1200] IXP1200's publicly available in Emulab

[Jay Lepreau]

I am pleased to announce the Utah Emulab testbed's integrated and
documented support for IXP1200's.  Currently we have 8 cards installed;
all are publicly available to anyone with a valid research, educational,
or development use, by signing up at www.emulab.net.

   http://www.emulab.net/tutorial/docwrapper.php3?docname=ixp.html

Similar to other Emulab resources, an IXP1200 node can be allocated
through an 'ns' script or through the Netbuild GUI.  It can be
configured as part of an arbitrary topology (of PCs, IXPs, or other
node types), with end-nodes, traffic generators, routers, links, etc.
Through NFS it has access to /proj and your Emulab home directory.
You can configure a command to run automatically upon bootup.  You
have full access to the serial consoles of both the IXP and its host
PC, which you can power cycle and of course reboot.

All that makes it easy to allocate, experiment with, and evaluate an
IXP-based application.

Right now we have 8 ENP2505 (Bridalveil) cards installed, with Intel
SDK 2.01 software. We hope to incorporate more IXP1200 nodes as we make
space in our machine room, and also IXP2400 cards as development
resources permit.

Many thanks go to Intel for helping to support this work, to NSF of
course, to the Emulab crew who helped develop it, and most especially to
our former student Abhijeet Joglekar, who became our IXP expert.... and
is now working at Intel.

Jay Lepreau
University of Utah