Our offering in terms of software tools relies on 2 separate components :

• nepi-ng focuses on experiment orchestration that runs on your laptop ; it allows you to describe the sequencing and dependencies of the various steps of your experiment, including if desired for loading images on the nodes when you start from scratch ;

• rhubarbe is a low-level tool that is available on the R2lab gateway, that helps inspect and change the node status (think: on or off) and to load and restore images on the nodes.

You can find a hands-on tutorial and introduction to both tools in the tutorials section.

nepi-ng : Network Experiment Programming Interface new generation

nepi-ng is a Python-based library to model and run network experiments on a variety of network evaluation testbeds. It allows to specify resources to use in an experiment, to define experiment workflow constraints and to automate deployment, resource control and result collection.

It only assumes ssh connectivity to the nodes to be controlled, so it is not specific to R2lab, and can be used in a variety of contexts; in particular it ensures optimal usage of ssh connections.

It is available through a CreateCommon license CC BY-NC-ND.

nepi-ng is in fact the addition of 2 python libraries named asynciojobs and apssh. You can find more details on their API and internals at the nepi-ng's entry-point website.

rhubarbe : a tool for low-level management of nodes

Less sophisticated, but still quite useful on a daily basis, rhubarbe is a R2lab-specific tool for doing quick nodes management from the command line on the gateway. It can also be invoked through nepi-ng as part of your automated experiment, typically in order to check that you have a valid lease at this time, load images, wait for the nodes to show up, or switch off the testbed when you leave (but don't worry if you forget, it's taken care of).

More details on rhubarbe can be found on its github repository.