Abstract

Many network testbeds today allow users to create their own disk images as a way of saving experimental state between allocations. We examine the effect of this practice on testbed operations. We find that disk imaging is very popular among both research and class users. Excessive disk image creation makes OS upgrades and patches time-demanding, leading over time to experiments that use old and vulnerable images. Since older images are not supported on new testbed hardware this hurts users by reducing their chance of successful resource allocation. Finally, disk images are usually large requiring excessive storage space on testbeds.

Date

August 6, 2012

Authors

Jelena Mirkovic, Abdulla Alwabel, Ted Faber

Conference

Proceedings of the 5th USENIX conference on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test

Pages

2-2

Publisher

USENIX Association