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User Guidelines

The XtreemOS Public Test Bed is a testbed designed to allow researchers and software developers to experiment with XtreemOS applications and services that benefit from computer resources provided by XtreemOS. The consortium partners have invested substantial engineering time and hardware to enable public access to a relatively powerful distributed system.

Thus, we wish users to be fully and clearly aware of expectations and to follow the use policy here in consideration for granting access to our testbed. Experiments using XtreemOS should be focused on learning and testing the capabilities of XtreemOS, along with porting applications which will be of interest to run on XtreemOS. Use of the test bed for purposes outside of this scope is not acceptable.


Guidelines

XtreemOS consists of computational resources hosted by organizations (principally research organizations like Universities) that donate their own time, rack-space, and network connectivity for the good of the community. Running an experiment on XtreemOS is fundamentally different from running it in a LAN-based lab or on an isolated wide-area testbed.

A good litmus test when considering whether an experiment is appropriate for XtreemOS is to ask what the network administrator at your organization would say about the experiment running on your local site. If the experiment disrupts local activity (e.g., uses more than its share of your site's Internet bandwidth) or triggers complaints from remote network administrators (e.g., performs systematic port scans), then it is not appropriate for XtreemOS. It is your responsibility to ensure that your use of XtreemOS falls within these constraints. This means you should debug your code in a controlled environment so you have confidence that you understand its behavior.

XtreemOS is also designed to allow experimental services to run continuously, thereby supporting an end-user community. As a consequence, XtreemOS could indirectly support users that have not officially registered with XtreemOS, and may even be unknown to you (the service provider). It is your responsibility to ensure that your users do not cause your service to violate the terms of this AUP. In particular, service providers should ensure that their users are not able to hijack the service and use it to attack or spam other nodes or network users.

We expect all users to adhere to widely-accepted standards of network etiquette in an effort to minimize complaints from network administrators. Activities that have been interpreted as worm and denial-of-service attacks in the past (and should be avoided) include sending SYN packets on random machines, probing random IP addresses, repeatedly pinging routers, overloading bottleneck links with measurement traffic and probing a single target machine from many XtreemOS nodes.

It is likely that individual sites that host XtreemOS nodes will have their own AUPs. Users should not knowingly violate such local AUPs. Conflicts between site AUPs and XtreemOS's stated goal of supporting research into grid computing should be brought to the attention of XtreemOS administrators.

XtreemOS provides absolutely no privacy guarantees with regard to packets sent to/from nodes. In fact, users should assume packets will be monitored and logged, for example, to allow other users to investigate abuse.

XtreemOS also does not provide any guarantees with respect to the reliability of individual nodes, which may be rebooted or reinstalled any time. Reinstalling a node implies that the disk is wiped, meaning that users should not treat the local disk as a persistent form of storage.


Overall Rules

  • XtreemOS should not be used for any illegal or commercial activities. Use for research and educational purposes is allowed.

Node Usage Rules

  • Use existing security mechanisms. For example, all access to XtreemOS nodes must be via SSH or other recommended means.
  • Do not circumvent accounting and auditing mechanisms. This means you must associate your identity with the XtreemOS account in which your service runs, and you must not do anything to obfuscate the audit trail.
  • No hacking attempts of the XtreemOS nodes. This includes "red team" (hacker test) experiments. All access is non-root.

Network Usage Rules

  • Do not use your XtreemOS account to gain access to any hosting site resources that you did not already have.
  • Do not use one or more XtreemOS nodes to flood a site with so much traffic as to interfere with its normal operation. Use congestion controlled flows for large transfers.
  • Do not do systematic or random port or address block scans. Do not spoof or sniff traffic.

Good Usage Guide

The XtreemOS test bed is a shared tool, used by many people with different and varying needs. Please be thoughtful in using it as a shared resource. This means:

  • Advising the mail list when you plan to run long running jobs or experiments.
  • Minimizing permanent storage on the hosts.
  • Logging out of your account when finished testing.
  • Platform usage is actively monitored by XtreemOS members. In case of non-conforming, your user account will be locked.
  • Importantly, outside access from the test bed is limited by policy. Use of the testbed for breaking INRIA or other consortium partner's usage policy is an occasion to lock out an account.
  • Sharing your access is forbidden.


Mailing Lists

We require that you subscribe to xtreemos-testbed mailing list. This a low traffic list, but important information is passed by this list.


Other communications

Please note the XtreemOS Test Bed link to the page in public writings of your usage. In addition, you can sometimes reach the test bed administrators via IRC on irc.freenode.net on #xtreemos.


Consequences

Violation of this AUP may result in any of the following:

  • Disabling the XtreemOS account
  • Informing the user's organization or employer.
  • Any other action deemed useful for protection of the computing resources provided by the test bed partners.

To report a suspected violation of this policy, please send an email to xtreemos-testbed-acc@lists.gforge.inria.fr